


Release

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Office, F/F, or whatever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-10-07
Packaged: 2018-08-08 15:13:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7762732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let’s pretend there was a prompt along the lines of “imagine that half of your OTP is unsettled by the other and that manifests itself in a slightly unusual way AU.” Because of why not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The world, or at least Helena Wells’s corner of it, seems beige.

She is not wholly ungrateful for this state of affairs, for if her world is beige, it is at least a smooth and glossy hue of same. She does not have problems, only the occasional irritation. She works at a job she does well, for which she is handsomely compensated. She has a lovely home and several lovely friends.

She is bored out of her mind.

“You could get a dog,” her lovely friend Abigail Cho suggested when Helena said words about ennui.

“I don’t want to get a dog,” Helena told her. “I dislike dogs.”

“Exactly. Instant conflict: no more fighting the old ennui.”

Abigail is a psychotherapist. Leena Frederic, who is Abigail’s partner in psychotherapy practice, is another of Helena’s lovely friends, and Helena supposes it is probably significant that her two best friends are mental health professionals. Leena had added, “Plus there’s the libidinal cathexis.”

“My libido is fine,” Helena objected. “I don’t have a great deal of time to devote to indulging it, but it is fine.”

“Maybe so. But you don’t invest it in anything.”

And while Helena had admitted that Leena did make a reasonable point, she did not follow Abigail’s suggestion that she acquire a dog.

So it is the start of another beige day. Helena is standing beside her lovely car in her workplace’s vast (and rather unlovely) parking lot, ID badge and attaché in hand, when something, or someone, catches her eye—and both her badge and bag slip from her suddenly boneless fingers onto the asphalt. She looks down, then up and around, but whatever it was does not spark at her again.

Well, at least she can say that her day has _begun_ differently.

The day, as it proceeds, is like most days on this large corporate campus. She has a meeting in this building, a meeting in that building. She hosts a conference call in her own office; she spends a tedious hour emptying her inbox. A reorganization is under way, with all sorts of new policies being implemented: a noncasual dress code, additional data and personnel security measures, new advisory committees to address every department and issue. Helena has already been assigned to several committees, and today there is a new one, ridiculously named “Impactful Diversity.” She opens the email informing her of its upcoming first meeting and scans the list of her fellow diversophiles… yes, the usual array of female, and/or black, and/or Asian, and/or Latino, and/or openly gay, and/or differently abled suspects; she and they are often pressed into service to show how wonderfully broadminded everyone at their staffing consultancy is. One name on the list, however, does catch her eye: Myka Bering. Helena had thought her long gone—not only from the company, but from the city as well.

Myka had been a mythical creature in some ways, some elusive fairytale beast, not that Helena was pursuing her, but had she been, she would have lost her job as huntress, for all she seemed to do was follow Myka around in the most bizarre of ways: she regularly arrived at parties held by mutual friends just as Myka was leaving. She took a position on a charity board only to find that Myka had held that very position in the prior term. She even, embarrassingly, found herself having a drink with a woman whom Myka had dated months before. This pattern continued—Helena began to think that they would never say words to each other beyond “hello” and “how nice to see you again”—until Helena took the job here.

She took the job here, and each time she passed Myka Bering in a hallway, each time their eyes met across the parking lot or the cafeteria or a conference room, they would smile more warmly at each other. One day, Helena told herself, one day soon, she would say to Myka that they should sit down and have coffee together, since they had known each other so long yet did not know each other at all. As soon as she got her feet under her, she decided, she would say those words.

She took the job here, and she worked to get her feet under her, and not a month later, she heard, Myka Bering left her own position and moved away. “Goodbye” and “it was nice to have almost known you” were clearly not among the words they were destined to say to each other.

Helena does not know what it means that Myka is back. If she is back. This might be an error, Myka’s name drawn from some ancient list of diversity-friendly employees… but the IT committee is meeting today, and Helena knows that another of its members is likely to have pertinent information.

Pete Lattimer does have that pertinent information: “She _was_ gone. It was a relationship thing, they thought a fresh start somewhere else would make it all better, but it didn’t. Stupid idea, like I tried to tell her at the time, so she’s back—pretending that the reorg was, like, the siren call or whatever, but nah. She never really wanted to leave in the first place, you know?”

“I don’t,” Helena tells him. “But thank you for satisfying my curiosity. Which committees did they assign you?”

Pete groans. “Oh, god, what am I on. Obviously IT here with you, awesome committee-buddy. Then there’s finance—they’re calling that one something about ‘The Business Bankroll,’ and I wish I coulda got bankrolled to come up with all these cheeseball dumbass names—plus HR. So you’re diversity, huh?”

“Yes. I, personally, am diversity.” But Helena laughs at him. She likes Pete Lattimer.

“That’s my _real_ straight white dude privilege: not having to be on that committee too. I mean with both you and Mykes there, it’d beat all the others, but man, there’s only so many meetings one person can sleep through.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Helena assures him.

“This reorg’s gonna go the way of every other reorg in history,” he assures her in return.

She asks him, “Is it possible to reorganize something that was never truly organized in the first place?”

“And that’s why you’re my awesome committee-buddy,” Pete enthuses. He raises a hand as if to high-five her, then says, “Aw, but you’re all fancy British and you hate that.” He’s right; Helena is a very poor high-fiver. But then he whispers, “You’re still my awesome committee-buddy, though,” getting this comment in right before the meeting is called to order, and it gives Helena cause to smile for at least five minutes more than she would have done. Awesome committee-buddy indeed… she _does_ like Pete Lattimer.

****

Helena had never stalked Myka Bering. She had not. She had just… followed her. Inadvertently.

Which is why it is somehow out of order when Helena, in transit between meetings, hears a voice behind her say her name. Her full name, asked as a question, so she turns around.

It’s Myka Bering. Helena loses her grip on three folders, all of which spill their contents upon industrially noncolored carpet.

Myka bends down, picks every page up, hands them all back to Helena. “I seriously didn’t mean to startle you,” she says, “but I thought I recognized you. Well. What I really thought I recognized was your hair. I thought, ‘I’d know that hair anywhere.’” She smiles.

“Yours too,” Helena says. “If I had seen it, I would have known it.”

Myka pulls at one of her long curls, pulls it and looks at it accusingly. “It’s not liking living in humidity again.”

“Welcome back,” Helena says, because otherwise she will say something to continue an absurd conversation about hair. “To the humidity, I mean.”

“Thanks,” Myka says. “This reorg. They asked me if I wanted to come back, and I… did.”

“Pete mentioned that.” If Myka does not want to talk about her real reasons, Helena certainly has no leave to ask her to do so. If Pete was even right… but Pete was probably right. Myka is darting her eyes a bit, so Pete was probably right. “I’m glad to see you again,” Helena says. It has nothing to do with Myka’s relationship status; she _is_ glad to see this tall, beautiful woman again. Who wouldn’t be?

“That’s sweet of you to say,” Myka tells her. “I’m glad to see you too. One of those good blasts from the past.”

****

Some days later, Helena looks out the window of her office. She has a lovely fourth-floor view of the unlovely parking lot, which has been taken over today by teenagers given leave to wash cars as a means of raising funds for some high school activity or other. She realizes she is looking at Myka Bering’s car being washed only when she realizes she is looking at Myka Bering, and she realizes she is looking at Myka Bering only when her recently retrieved printouts hit the floor.

 _This will not do_ , she thinks.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original Tumblr tags: this is a quick thing to get some stuff out of my system, and goose some other stuff out of my head, it'll be pretty quiet overall, but helena overcome, and having a hard time dealing, is of course a favorite of mine, particularly when she thinks she's cool, and is in fact not at all cool, and has no idea where myka is in any of it, but trust me, she'll be finding out pretty soon, and everybody will get their bounce back, (maybe even me! i can but hope!), and then maybe something something evisceration, just for giggles


	2. Chapter 2

“I have a problem,” Helena says to Abigail and Leena. They are all eating dinner at a lovely restaurant.

Abigail chortles. Leena makes an obvious effort to hold back a laugh of her own, but she fails: her laugh, at least, is melodious. Abigail elbows Leena and says, “What’s the best line here? Is it something about how well we know she’s got a problem? Or is about how saying she’s got _a_ problem is an understatement that’s in itself kind of hyperbolic?”

Helena glares at Abigail. Leena says, “Or we could be nice.”

“She doesn’t make it easy,” Abigail objects. “But fine. Fine. What’s your _one_ problem?”

Helena takes a deep breath. “It’s extremely odd. I drop things. Things fall from my hands.”

“At random?” Abigail asks.

“No.”

“Not at random,” Abigail says.

“No.”

“Are you going to explain this not-random way things fall from your hands, or do you want us to guess?”

Helena wonders if she could possibly get away with changing her mind about telling them. “I’m working up to it,” she says.

Abigail groans, “Reeeeeaaally slowly.”

Leena, who has always been far sweeter than Abigail, asks, with real concern, “This dropping-things problem, do you think it could be medical?”

“I’ve looked into it,” Helena says, with a reassuring smile. “It doesn’t seem to be.”

Now Leena sounds a bit less concerned. “Then what _does_ it seem to be?”

“It seems to be associated with the sight of a particular person.”

“The sight of a particular person makes you drop things,” Abigail says. She is completely deadpan, and Helena does not feel at all comfortable with what might be coming next… “Is it a female person?”

“Yes,” Helena says. “It’s Myka Bering, from work.”

“I know Myka!” Leena exclaims. Abigail looks quizzical, and Leena tells her, “So do you. Remember when we were doing that pro bono counseling, she was the one coordinating with the families.”

“Oh, _that_ Myka. The good-looking one, with the eyes. I thought she was gone.”

“She _was_ gone,” Helena says. She wants to tell Abigail to not say one more word about Myka’s looks. Particularly her eyes. “She was gone, but now she is back.”

“She’s back and making you drop things,” Abigail states, as if relieved to finally be in possession of all the facts.

“Yes. And all right, now do your worst: what is the matter with me?”

Abigail says, with a shrug, “Seems pretty obvious to me.”

“Me too,” Leena agrees.

Helena looks from one to the other. “What seems obvious?”

“You want to tell her, or should I?” Abigail asks Leena.

“I will. She’ll think you’re joking,” Leena tells Abigail.

“Tell me what?” Helena demands. “Joking about what?”

Leena smiles. She has an exceptionally sweet, understanding smile, but Helena is fairly certain she is not going to enjoy being understood in this instance. “Helena,” Leena says. “Your hands.”

“Yes, my hands.”

Leena smiles again, with even more understanding. “Yes, your hands. Want to be doing something else.”

Helena takes those tell-tale hands, shakes them, and pushes them through her hair. “Oh, stop,” she says… possibly to Leena and Abigail, possibly to her hands. But yes, all right. She had been afraid they would say exactly this. Well, not _exactly_ this, but something that would… confirm. Suspicions. That Helena has been… suspecting.

“She can stop,” Abigail says, “but I bet it won’t change anything. Will it?”

Helena begs, “Leena, you’re the Freudian. Surely this might be one of those situations in which something seems to mean one thing but actually means something else?”

Leena now smiles with apology. “It might be, but the look on your face suggests that it isn’t.”

Helena contemplates putting a bag over her own head. To hide whatever look is on her face.

“The good news is, there’s a solution,” Abigail says.

“What is it?” But Helena knows not to be too avid, not when Abigail has that tone…

“Let your hands do what they want.” This is followed by a truly evil chuckle.

Helena now contemplates putting a bag over _Abigail’s_ head. Just on general principles. “First, assuming that you are correct about my hands and what they… want, she and I don’t know each other at all well enough for that. And second, she just left a serious relationship. It cannot possibly be the appropriate time to even broach the subject of letting my hands do what they want. If that is even what they want. Absolutely not.”

“Why do you have to make everything so difficult? Okay, fine, alternate solution.”

“What?”

“Here it is: when you see her, whatever’s in your hands? Set it down gently.”

“I hate you,” Helena declares. “If Leena had this problem, you would not be so quick to joke about it. You would actually _help her_.”

Abigail shrugs. “Leena didn’t have this problem. If I’m remembering correctly, Myka didn’t make her drop things. I’m not saying she tried anything impressive like juggling when Myka was around; just a basic opposable-thumbed grip. Which some people can, you know, maintain. Even in the unsettling presence of Myka Bering.”

“You are saying these things to torment me.”

“True. It’s because I have to be understanding all day with clients. It’s a strain; I have to let off steam somehow.”

“Take it easy on her,” Leena tells Abigail. “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen that look on her face.”

Helena considers the bag again.

****

It is not only the _sight_ of Myka that poses a problem, Helena soon discovers.

When Claudia, one of Helena’s most valued employees in the IT department, begins carrying on a conversation with someone just outside Helena’s office door, Helena does not initially think much about it. But then her brain catches up with what she is hearing… and she understands who Claudia’s interlocutor is… and that Claudia’s interlocutor is standing and speaking _right there_ …

Five minutes later, Claudia has barged into Helena’s office. Once she has determined that Helena is all right, she changes her tone to that of a just-the-facts police investigator and asks, “So what was all that racket?”

“I dropped my stapler.”

“Boss, that was not just a dropped stapler.”

“I dropped it twice.” A not untrue statement.

“Please. You sounded like you were auditioning for some avant-garde percussion ensemble. And FYI, you did _not_ get the job.” Claudia crosses her arms and leans back.

“Oh, fine. In the interest of scientific experimentation, I also dropped my telephone charger, the post-it dispenser, a flash drive, my coffee mug—though in retrospect I see that I picked that, a breakable object, up in error, and I apologize to you for the fact that I will no longer be able to advertise, via mug, that I am ‘boss of the world’s greatest sysadmin’—a staple remover, several binder clips and writing implements, and, finally, my chair.”

“Why did you drop your chair? Actually, no, rewind that back a little further, why did you pick up your chair in the first place?”

“I told you: I was experimenting.”

“I’m gonna regret asking this, probably as much as I still regret asking why you were wearing a tam o’ shanter that one time. But here goes: Why were you experimenting?”

Well, why not say it? Claudia already thinks Helena is an extremely strange animal, and it has had no adverse effect on their working relationship thus far. “Myka makes me drop things.”

“What, like in a ‘here she is, I have to drop everything and listen to her’ way?”

“No. In a ‘things fall from my hands’ way.”

“Things literally fall from your hands.”

“Yes. If something is in my hands, it is soon no longer in my hands. And I was trying to ascertain the… duration of the effect.” Duration: quite unfortunately lengthy.

“Are you doing some running gag?”

“I wish I were.” Helena considers. “Although I suppose it could be categorized as funny. My friend Abigail—my _supposed_ friend Abigail—seems to find it hilarious that my hands apparently want, when I am near Myka, to do something other than the extremely simple things they should.”

“Myka’s good-looking. She’s smart and nice _and_ good-looking. I don’t swing that way, but I can see how somebody like yourself might have some ideas about gettin’ all handsy.”

“I am feeling less apologetic about the mug.”

“Dude, you’re the one who brought up hands. I was just thinking about asking if we could replace you with a decent drum synth plugin; I didn’t open with ‘hey, what say we talk about Myka Bering because of how bad you want to get in her pants.’”

“Stop,” Helena says weakly. “Or you’re… fired.”

“But you _do_. You so obviously _do_.”

“Must we _begin_ with pants? Let us say, I want to get in her _good graces_.”

“Gotcha. Code words are very important, particularly in our newly formal office environment. Good graces equals pants.” She slaps Helena’s desk. “It is law.” Now she grins. “And I’m not fired.”

“You are not fired,” Helena agrees. “Although I’m sure that, in our newly formal office environment, the conversation we just had is grounds for dismissal of the both of us.”

“Code words from now on,” Claudia reminds her.

****

Helena arrives a bit late, and a bit breathless, to the first meeting of the diversity committee. She sees Myka on the far side of the table, across the room. She drops her portfolio and pen. During the meeting, she drops her pen again. Twice.

At the second meeting, to which Helena arrives early so that she can set her things down gently, as Abigail suggested, Myka arrives early also. And sits down next to Helena. And says, “Hi.”

Helena turns toward Myka. She has not had time to set her tablet down gently: she drops it on the floor between them. “I’m so terribly sorry,” she says as she begins to lean over to retrieve it—but then she rapidly aborts that movement, for it will put her face very near Myka’s lap, and Helena at least does still have enough of her wits about her to understand that that would be completely… well, salivatory, but also, put simply, it would be… no, no luck, she is now stuck on “salivatory,” which she doubts is even an actual word.

Myka hands her the tablet. “I think it survived the fall,” she says with a smile.

Helena takes a breath. She says, “Thank you so much.” She pauses, takes another breath. “I must have been preoccupied.”

“With?”

Helena drops the tablet again.

****

“Calm down,” Abigail tells Helena. “It’s just bowling.”

“No it isn’t,” Helena tells her in return. This was to be a dinner with Leena, too, but Leena’s five-year-old daughter is ill, and in such a circumstance nothing is so necessary, so necessary and comforting, as her mother’s presence. Helena is a bit jealous.

“Okay, you’re right, it isn’t. It’s bowling for a _charity_ , which isn’t bowling at all. Don’t they put the bumpers in the gutters for you pathetic corporate types?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what’s your problem?”

Helena admits it: “I am a member of Team Diversity.”

“That’s hilarious. You’re one of the least diverse people I know.”

“I am a woman. I am an extremely nonheterosexual woman. My diversity bona fides are thus established, as far as the company is concerned. Also I am on a committee.”

“Well, okay, and I guess you _also_ talk like you belong in a Regency romance a lot of the time. Triple diversity threat.”

“No I do not. But, talking of triple threats: so says the extremely nonheterosexual Asian woman. A sentence, incidentally, that I believe has never been included in a Regency romance.”

“I cover the waterfront. Then again, so does Leena: she’s straight, but she’s black, a woman, _and_ foreign-born.”

“Canada, though. Not _so_ foreign. And if that counts, does it not make my threat quadruple?”

“No. England folds into the Regency-talking thing. So what’s the big deal, Miss Diversity? They make you team captain or something, despite the fact that you’ll probably bowl, what, a thirty?”

“I am not the team’s captain.” She sighs. “But perhaps you can guess who is.”

Abigail _stands up_ , she is so overcome. Helena would not be surprised to see her flip the table. “Oh, oh, oh! _Please_ let me come with you so I can watch you drop bowling balls _all night long_. Oh and you could drop them on your _foot!_ On both of your feet! On _Myka Bering’s feet!_ In my _life_ I have never wanted anything more than this. In my _life_.”

“Sit down,” Helena tells her. “You sound exactly like Claudia did, earlier today, upon hearing the captaincy news.”

“Claudia, as in your redheaded admin Claudia? So? Great minds.”

“She is over two decades younger than you are.”

“So you’re saying I’m youthful. It’s rare that I get a real compliment from you, so I’ll take that.”

****

Of course Helena does drop bowling balls—“You okay there, slugger?” asks Pete, Team Bankroll’s captain, after the fourth, or possibly it is the fifth, incidence of same, but he is perfectly affable about it—and of course she bowls abysmally. She cannot imagine that anyone would have expected any sort of skill from her, so that is really no cause for concern.

She manages to knock down six pins once, but that is only because Myka steps out to take a telephone call. Pete draws enthusiastic attention to Helena’s “success” when Myka comes back in: “Look what _your_ awesome teammate who happens to be _my_ awesome committee-buddy did! Look at that: six whole pins!”

Myka smiles at Helena, then turns to Pete and says, “Pete, she’s _my_ awesome committee-buddy too. That’s why we get to be awesome teammates.”

“Awesome” has never seemed so high a compliment.

Later in the evening, when only the people who actually can bowl with some degree of skill are still bothering to compete, Team Diversity’s Captain Bering manages, on her first roll, to knock down eight of the ten pins; however, she leaves herself with one pin standing at each side of the lane. “Seven-ten split,” Pete says to Helena. He shakes his head. “Tough to pick that up.”

Myka is all concentration—well, all green eyes, curly hair, long legs, and concentration—and Helena could watch her hold her bowling ball up before her (while envying her the _ability_ to hold her bowling ball) forever. Then she launches it down the lane, and Helena feels Pete tense beside her, hears him start saying “oh my god… look… at… THAT!”

For, with a clatter and skid of the pin on the right into its brother on the left, the spare is Myka’s, and she whirls around, grinning hugely, and she is _so_ surprised and pleased with herself, and _everybody_ high-fives her, and Helena sees as the high-fiving begins that it would be conspicuous for her to abstain, and she absolutely does not want to abstain, but then she thinks that people might _think_ she would abstain given that everyone knows, as Pete does, that she is not a natural high-fiver, so she thinks for the briefest of instants that she might just... but there is Myka right in front of her, flushed and ecstatic, palm raised—it should be a _simple little slap_ , like the others, but their hands catch and grasp. It’s just one extra second, perhaps two, but Helena’s stomach falls. Because what this seems to mean is that the one thing Helena is able to hold, in Myka’s presence, is Myka’s hand.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original Tumblr tags: I apologize profusely for being in this mood, but slapstick makes me happy, it makes me so happy, I just float on air at the idea of people dropping things, (accidentally or experimentally!), and running into things, and slipping on things, I'm sure it's because I myself am clumsy to a really unreasonable degree, however as grandhike/notallwonder so aptly pointed out recently, I managed to refrain from passing out, hitting my head on a table, and bleeding all over Joanne Kelly, so really once you've managed not to do that, everything else is just graceful gravy


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next part. In which—spoilers!—Helena drops some stuff. That’s about all that can be said, really, because that’s all this thing is about, really. Well, maybe Myka becomes slightly less of an enigma. But only slightly. And there might be some discussion of evisceration, because when you think comedy… well, okay, maybe that’s not the immediate next step.

When, on the Monday after bowling, Myka sends Helena an e-mail query about something IT-related, some cost structure or other, Helena dashes off a factual response and adds, at the end, “You captained Team Diversity beautifully, by the way.” She sends the e-mail, then is struck by the thought that that will sound, to Myka, either terribly formal or hopelessly flirtatious. She is then further struck by the thought that regardless of how it is taken, she was able to type it with unfumbling fingers. It is a relief to learn that “Myka Bering’s presence” does not mean “Myka Bering’s electronic presence.”

Myka e-mails, in return, “Thanks—for the information and the compliment.” Helena picks up a paperclip and holds it while she reads this reassuring sentence. She reads the sentence several times, in fact, and the paperclip is still between her fingers each time she glances at her hand. Yes, she decides, this is a relief; on several levels, this is a relief.

It is not a relief, however, to be reminded later in the week that “Myka Bering’s presence” still means “Myka Bering’s physical presence.” Helena and Pete are seated at a cafeteria table together, for they have been tasked with devising at least five potential “strategic initiatives” for the IT committee to pursue—Pete had laughed at that assignment, saying, “I think our first one should be an initiative to strategically take down these redundant committees”—when he suddenly begins waving frantically. Helena looks up to see why. When she looks back down, she and Pete are both covered in black coffee, and the replacement mug Claudia had provided her, which declares humans to be bad code, is in ruins, its declaration affirmed by the manner of its own destruction.

“I haven’t seen either of you since bowling last weekend,” Myka remarks as she sits down with them. Pete is taking a wad of paper napkins to his tie, and Helena is glancing resignedly among the pieces of her coffee mug, the stain on her light gray skirt, and the look of amusement on Myka’s face.

“Bowling. Feels like the good old days. We wore a lot less coffee back then,” Pete grumbles.

“I’m so very sorry,” Helena tells him. “Send me the dry-cleaning bill. Or the bill for a new shirt and tie. Or both.”

Pete, gentleman that he is, waves her off. “Nah, ’sreally okay. I wear this tie too much anyhow. Good coffee-push to get out of my wardrobe rut.”

“I think you dress very nicely,” Helena says.

“You do,” Myka agrees. “Now, I mean, more than before. The new dress code’s really working for you.”

He waggles his hand at her. “Only so-so. On the up, I lost ten pounds so I could actually fit my gut into the one suit I owned, right when they made the change. But now none of my old jeans fit my awesome new bod, plus they’re all out of style.”

“As problems go…” Myka shrugs.

“You never even had that problem,” he accuses. “You always dressed nicer than everybody else.”

“Not nicer. Just more professionally, because Pete, this is going to shock you, but I like how I feel in a suit. Or the equivalent.”

“You certainly should,” Helena says without thinking. Then she starts thinking again, and she thinks that Pete and Myka’s badinage must have lulled her into some kind of trance, under the influence of which a person has no choice but to blurt out her real thoughts.

Myka turns to Helena. “You should too,” she says, and their gazes are holding, just as their hands did in the palm slap of the bowling-alley high five.

As Helena is muddle-headedly trying to determine how she might induce a high-five-appropriate situation here in the cafeteria, because that would allow her to touch Myka, Pete says, “Earth to committee-buddy: we still gotta get those stupid ‘initiatives’ locked down before the meeting. Hey, Mykes, got any ideas about IT?”

“Maybe,” Myka says with a little smile. She stands. Rather, Helena corrects herself, she unfurls her beautifully besuited self from the chair… and she does not simply _walk_ away, no, she equanimizes away, so very calmly, with enviable composure.

Once Helena can truly think again, she asks Pete, “Is ‘to equanimize’ a verb?”

“I have no idea, but it sounds kinda corporate. So I think we should definitely say that’s what one of the strategies is, some kind of IT equinaminalizing, or whatever it was that you said.”

“That sounds as if might have something to do with horses.”

“Ride ’em, cowgirl,” Pete advises her. “Or dump coffee on ’em. That’d make a pretty good initiative too, by the way.”

“IT caffeinalization?” Helena asks.

Pete nods. “You have all the best ideas, awesome committee-buddy. I don’t even care that you illustrated that one on my crappy tie.”

****

On a hot, humid evening, Helena leaves work later than anyone save, apparently, the overnight security staff; the number of cars that remain in the lot as she at last drives away is minuscule. The company’s offices are a twenty-minute highway drive from the edges of what truly could be called civilization. It’s a drive that is hideously crowded if one tries to make it amidst the crunch of nine-to-fivers. If one stays late, however, the highway becomes a ghost road.

Helena’s headlights illuminate, in the rapidly deepening dusk, a car on the side of that road. They also illuminate the fact that a tall, beautiful woman is standing beside that car. Helena steels herself. She steels herself, and she steers her car to the side of the road, behind Myka’s. She parks and gazes for a moment at the woman who is somehow managing to lean extremely angrily and aggressively against the driver’s side door of her shiny vehicle, the interior of which Helena suspects still smells fresh from the factory. Helena exits her own car and closes its door behind her. She walks forward; she is four yards away from Myka. Now three. Now two, and finally one. She stops moving, but she in no way comes to rest.

“You buy a _car_ ,” Myka greets her.

“Mm,” Helena responds. Myka’s voice is raspy, furious; she has obviously been pushing her hands through her hair in frustration. She pushes those hands again through that mess of hair, and she looks, to Helena’s eyes, gloriously unattractive. She would look, Helena is certain, exactly this gloriously unattractive in bed. Myka is thus rapidly approaching a state that Helena is terrified must be termed irresistible, and she has to exercise physical _willpower_ to keep from moving those additional three feet forward and pushing Myka against that car, pushing her _hard_ , pushing with her duplicitous hands and lips and legs and everything else a body might push with. _My hands are busy holding my keys_ , Helena mantras internally. _My hands do not want to do anything else_. _My hands are busy holding my keys._

“You buy a _car_ ,” Myka repeats, in a snarl. It is the most arousing sound Helena has ever heard. “You buy it _new_.”

Helena loses her hold on her keys. Into the dirt they fall.

“You read its _manual_. You keep it _clean_.” Myka slaps her palm back onto the very clean car against which she is still leaning aggressively. Aggressively and oh, god, sexily. “And it repays you by breaking down after the worst damn day in your working life, when all you want to do is go home and sit very still except for the part where every once in a while you raise an alcoholic beverage to your mouth.”

Helena wishes Myka had not said “mouth.” Because now she is looking at Myka’s mouth, and that way lies… not madness, not precisely, but maddeningly inappropriate thoughts involving that mouth, that mouth and how it would taste and move against Helena’s, if Helena were indeed to, on this already humid, overheated evening, push an angry, overheated Myka hard against her shiny, broken-down car and do what she has wanted to do for years. _Years_. Since their very first meeting, that brief meeting, the one Helena has tried, certainly recently, _constantly_ recently, to tell herself she does not remember distinctly, but she does. She does, and she always has.

Always has and always will, not because of how large it was, but how small: downtown, on a sidewalk, a Saturday afternoon sidewalk, a Saturday afternoon early in Helena’s tenure here in this city, she encountered someone she had recently met—that person’s identity has disappeared completely from her memory, though she can think of any number of people it might have been—and that someone was walking along that sidewalk with Myka, to whom Helena was introduced. Myka had held, in the crook of her arm, a not inconsiderable stack of library books. Helena had looked at the books, looked at Myka’s face… she does not think she fell in love. Not in love, not exactly. She fell into… unconditionality, as if she had previously been engaged in some lifelong contract negotiation but suddenly was moved to withdraw all her demands.

For Myka had shifted the books’ weight just a bit, and Helena’s impulse had been to say _Let me hold those for you_ , not because of any thoughts of carrying schoolbooks for one’s crush, but rather due to a suddenly undismissible idea about obligation—not to obligate Myka to her; instead, Helena wanted to obligate herself: _I must follow you, for I am holding your books._

Now, of course, she could not obligate, would be physically incapable of obligating, herself in such a way. Because if she had not already dropped her keys? How _clear_ it is that they would soon be nestled in the roadside gravel. Keys, folders, tablets, pens, staplers, mugs, chairs, bowling balls, bowling _shoes_ , library books, shopping bags, decks of cards, lunch trays, telephones, kitchen gadgets, crudités, power tools, small indignant animals: anything and everything one could lift and try to hold would be decorating the ground around her feet, because Leena and Abigail have been right all along about what Helena’s hands have wanted to do—of course they have been right. Helena sighs resignedly. “Do you need a ride somewhere?” she asks. In her head, she hears someone, possibly Claudia, possibly Abigail, possibly the both of them, laughing and laughing.

Myka says, “I called Triple A. They said a tow truck should be here soon… not that I think they define ‘soon’ like the dictionary does. But you’re sweet to offer.”

 _I’m not sweet at all_ , Helena feels she should say. _In the interest of accuracy, I must tell you that I am not sweet at all_. A sweet person would not be thinking such thoughts as the ones Helena is thinking, and while a sweet person might say what Helena finds herself saying—“It’s so warm this evening. Would you at least like to sit for a while in my car’s air conditioning?”—a sweet person would not sound like a leering yet incompetent Lothario in doing so.

Helena prays that she is conveying nonchalance as she leans over to pick up her keys.

“That sounds wonderful. I thought it was supposed to cool off tonight,” Myka complains as she makes her way to the passenger side of Helena’s car.

The keys fall once more outside the car, and Myka watches that happen, watches as Helena has to lean over and pick them up _again_ , and that is mortifying enough. But then Helena, once she has got inside the car, reaches to move her attaché from the passenger seat, out of Myka’s way… and she succeeds only in tipping it forward, so that its contents cascade onto the floor mat.

“You take a lot of work home,” is Myka’s only comment as Helena scrambles to gather all of it up, scrambles while at the same time trying to avoid looking Myka straight in the legs.

Helena apologizes. It seems like all she ever does. “I’m not usually this clumsy,” she says, and Myka will understand that statement, she is sure, as the most transparent of all deceptions. “Around… people,” she tries to clarify.

“That’s okay. I’m typically the one who tends to outclumsy everybody in the room.”

“Surely not,” Helena says, and _finally_ she manages to wrestle everything back into the bag, fumble it into the rear seat, use the steering wheel and her body to block the keys from falling yet again, and bring the car to life. Myka slips in and shuts the door as Helena says, “After all, you were the one responsible for Team Diversity’s bowling championship.”

Myka chuckles. “Maybe I balanced you out, but I’m pretty sure Kelly was the one who put us over the top. What did she get, five strikes? Six? She should turn pro.”

“Why do you want to send her away and doom us?” Helena asks. They smile at each other, then sit quietly. The vents exhale blessedly icy air, and Helena casts about for something to say. “Why was it the worst day of your working life?” she tries. “If that isn’t too personal, or too upsetting, a question.”

“It isn’t too personal… and it isn’t really upsetting, either. ‘Worst’ might have been a _little_ exaggeration. Still… the job I’m in now? I’m pretty sure I’ve done it before.”

“My understanding is that you have,” Helena says.

“And I’m pretty sure I still know how to put together a staffing proposal.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Well, your opinion doesn’t count. And neither does mine.”

“Whose does?”

Myka had been staring at the glove compartment. Now she looks at Helena and takes a breath. “I shouldn’t say.”

“You can’t think I’d be surprised by the idea that someone at our place of employment has poor judgment.”

“No, I mean I shouldn’t say _to you_.”

“Why not? Was it someone in my department? Because if it was, you certainly should say it to me, because that would be stepping well beyond the bounds, and I will do something to address the situation—”

“No, no,” Myka says, and she places what she apparently intends to be a calming hand on Helena’s forearm. Helena has never been so unsoothed in her life, and she is fervently grateful that her own hands are empty. “I appreciate that you’d do that, but it’s really that I just don’t want to say anything that would make you think… because if you did happen to have a high opinion of somebody, and I started railing about mansplaining, you might either try to defend him, or maybe change your opinion, which isn’t my place to lead you to do. Not in this circumstance.”

“But if this man is so foolish as to suggest that you do not know your job? If I did hold such a high opinion, it _should_ change. For the worse.” Because Myka is very good at her job. Helena knows this, via Pete above all, but also on her own recognizance. She certainly hasn’t stopped anyone from talking about Myka… she has been, in fact, pathetically willing to hang on every single Myka-related word anyone has been willing to utter, both in the past and now in the present… and she wonders, now, how she could have misunderstood herself so dramatically. And it strikes her how absurd it is to finally know, with such certainty, now, sitting here, in a dark car…

“Well, it’s a matter of timing,” Myka is saying.

“Is it?” Helena asks… Myka cannot have read her thoughts so clearly. Can she have? Surely not surely not surely not….

“I mean, I barely got back. And you’ve been here, and if… I mean I don’t know what you… okay. I don’t know if you’re still seeing him.”

“Seeing him. Seeing _him_?” To what _him_ could she be referring?

Myka sighs. “Nate.”

“Nate, in staffing? Nate, with whom you now once again work? That Nate?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would you think I would be seeing him? Why on earth would you think that? Why would _anyone_ think that?”

“I ran into you. That one time, don’t you remember? You and he were out at that place off the parkway, and I showed up. And you asked me if I wanted to join you, and I said I didn’t want to intrude, and Nate made it pretty clear he’d prefer it if I didn’t. You were a little out of it.”

Now Helena does remember, though her memory is admittedly hazy. “That wasn’t… we weren’t… it had been a large group from work, celebrating the signing of a large contract, and we were the only two left.” She had in fact thought that Myka might appear at the celebration. She had completely forgotten—or, perhaps, had not been fully aware—that Myka had, in the end, done so. “Why did you arrive so late?”

“I went home first. I was just going to change clothes, but then… well, we had a fight. So I was late, and I was thinking all kinds of thoughts about how maybe everything was all over and I could drown my sorrows. Something melodramatic. And then you were with him—or he made me think you were with him, I guess—and so I decided to just go home again. That was actually the night we decided to leave. To… start over. It was a stupid idea. Pete tried to tell me.” She pauses. “I guess I do sort of wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t gone home. Then. How everything would have… I don’t know. Played out.”

Helena is marveling at her drunk self’s apparent ability to do what her sober self had put off, waiting for the right time… and her drunk self had chosen exactly the wrong time… no. The right time, but the wrong company, because if not for Nate… “I can’t believe it,” she now says. “I will eviscerate him.”

“Can I watch?” Myka asks. The hope in her voice is _adorable_ , and Helena once again has to hold herself entirely back. She considers putting on her seat belt… but no, she would never be able to maintain a grip long enough to fasten it; her arm would find itself tangled; Myka would gaze at her with that bemused expression…

Helena settles for saying, “Can you _watch?_ I fully expect you to _help_.” She considers. “We should develop an initiative for strategic evisceration.”

“You sound surprisingly like Pete.”

“I find that a surprisingly satisfactory state of affairs. I like Pete very much.”

“I do too. I missed him. While I was gone.”

“I missed _you_ ,” Helena blurts. Then she backpedals. “Well. What I mean is, once you came back, I realized that I must have done. Or rather, now that you _are_ back, I find myself happy that you are, from which follows logically the idea that I was in some way unhappy that you were gone, and isn’t that the definition of what it is to miss someone?”

Myka shakes her head, looks up, smiles that smile. “I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s the definition of something I’m happy to hear.” She drops her head. “I don’t mean I’m happy that you were unhappy. Although if you just lately realized you were, or reasoned that you must have been, does it make any sense to say that you actually were? Maybe you really weren’t, but now you think you were. Because of how happy you are now from the high you’re on from… winning at bowling? I mean I’m pretty happy too right now, come to think of it… or maybe we’re both just well-rested from all those committee meetings. That’s what Pete’s been saying lately, anyway, and I—” She stops talking. “Sorry. I think I’m working on some verbal equivalent of clumsiness there.”

“I have a friend who is a psychotherapist,” Helena begins. “Actually, I have two friends who are psychotherapists.”

Myka smiles that smile again. “And you’re telling me this because you think I need help?”

“No. I’m telling you this because those friends—actually I believe you know them both—would most likely argue that I was repressing my very real unhappiness. Screening it from myself.”

“Is that better?” Myka asks. “Wouldn’t you rather be on a bowling high now than have to understand yourself as having been genuinely unhappy then?”

“Are _you_ on a bowling high now?” Helena counters.

“I… I’m not sure,” Myka says. She blinks: a long, slow movement of eyelids down, up. Her reopened eyes glisten with fresh tear-film.

The car is cool and dark and private, and Helena has not dropped anything in at least five minutes. She feels herself to be more in possession of all her senses than she ever has in Myka’s presence—she feels in hyperpossession of her senses, in fact, though that does not help her interpret what they are telling her…

But suddenly she wonders if her eyes perhaps overheard her words about screening things from herself, or if they have decided to take their cue from her hands and betray her, because all at once she cannot see, and she would _like_ to see, like to know whether Myka is moving toward her as she is moving toward Myka—but she soon realizes that the blinding is not of her own making: it is caused by headlights, tow-truck headlights, and Helena does not know whether they have saved her or ruined her.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original Tumblr tags: this part isn't as funny, I know it, but I needed a bit of a plotty turn, don't worry though, we're almost finished, just need to work out those strategic evisceration details, and then bring it in for a landing, which I assure you will come with a thud of some sort


	4. Chapter 4

Since the night of Myka’s car breakdown, Helena has thought, perhaps overextensively, on the oddball, now-inescapably twinned topics of yearning and evisceration. Myka had emailed to thank her for the respite provided by her air conditioning, and Helena replied with a query as to the health of Myka’s vehicle. Myka answered, “Ironically, it was a computer problem. A pretty quick fix. I bet you could have done it—and then no need for AAA.” Helena wanted to respond by saying something about “but then no conversation in my car, either”… and yet despite that conversation in her car, she has no idea what steps she should take to move forward from it. Or whether she should try. 

She does not want to get ahead of herself. They have waved to each other once across the cafeteria—Helena had been carrying only a stack of paper napkins and was strangely dissatisfied with their gentle, quiet flutter to the floor—but other than that, and the emails, they have had no interaction since Myka related her frustration with Nate. Helena would genuinely like to do something about that, if only to be able to… well, to give Myka a gift of sorts, the satiating gift of seeing Nate suffer some consequence for what he did, both to Myka and to Helena, though she does admit that the statute of limitations governing his offense against herself has most likely expired. The thought makes her peevish. It makes her want even more fervently to exact revenge on Myka’s behalf.

Here, too, however, she does not want to get ahead of herself. She decides to get Pete’s take on the Nate matter, or rather, to find out whether Pete has any knowledge of the Nate matter. Helena reasons that if Myka spoke with Pete about it, then her anger was more than a simple case of end-of-day irritation exacerbated by the car breakdown.

As she and Pete share a midmorning coffee in the cafeteria, she opens with, “Has Myka expressed any… concerns to you recently?”

Pete says, “Uh. Concerns?” He looks at his coffee. He takes a slurp of his coffee. “I shouldn’t say.”

Helena cannot help herself; she exclaims, “Oh for the love of god not you too.”

“Me _too_? Who else has Myka been talking about this with?”

“With me, at least to begin with.”

“But if she was talking to _you_ about it, then I don’t see why she had to talk to _me_. Why didn’t the two of you just… work it out?”

This frustrates Helena immensely. “I thought we had! But if she did not convey the information to you… I have no idea what to think about that.”

“Well, geez, I don’t either.”

“I am not seeing him,” she states, hoping that it will finally be the last word on the matter.

“You’re not seeing him,” Pete echoes. “You’re not seeing him _who_?”

“Nate!”

“Nate in staffing? Nate who works with Myka? Why would anybody think you were seeing that guy?”

“Myka did! And obviously you did as well!”

“I did not!”

How can he possibly… “Then why on earth did you say that you shouldn’t tell me about Myka’s… concerns?”

“Because the concerns are about you!” As soon as Pete utters these words, he claps his hand over his mouth.

“Me? What did I do?” She is terrified by the possible answers to that question.

Between his fingers, Pete mumbles, “Nothing. I swear to god, you’ve done _nothing_. Nothing is the complete and total entirety of what you’ve done. Absolutely nothing.”

Helena says, just to reconfirm, “I have done absolutely nothing.” Pete nods, hand still over his mouth. “Then I don’t understand,” she admits. It may be the most true thing she has ever said.

Now Pete looks confused. “Neither do I. What’s Nate got to do with anything?”

“He criticized one of Myka’s proposals. In, I gather, an extremely belittling way.”

This turns Pete cheerful. “So when’s the barbecue?” He sits back and taps his fingers against each other, as if he were a supervillain in a cartoon.

“The barbecue?”

“We’re gonna roast him on a spit, right?”

Helena smiles. “I suggested evisceration.”

He nods. “That’d work too. Little messier, though.”

“I think skewering him in preparation for roasting might be similarly messy. In either event, we’ll need dropcloths.”

He nods again, completely unperturbed. “I like the way you think. Seriously, is there something we can do to him? Nobody likes that guy.”

“We could have everyone at the company re-explain to him every single item with which he comes into contact. ‘This is the copy machine. It reproduces documents.’ ‘Email, as you are most likely unaware, is intended for communication.’ ‘The coffee mug is a highly technical piece of equipment.’” She is stewing and she knows it; she must sound terribly ill-tempered.

But Pete laughs. “I don’t think you have a lot of room on the coffee mug front. I pitched that tie out, by the way, and my girlfriend told me to thank you. So, hey, Amanda says thanks. Me, I say why don’t we just key his car?”

“I suppose we could do that… but it seems a bit juvenile. Also actionable.”

“I guess, speaking of you and coffee mugs, you and me and Myka could take the caffeinalization strategy to the next level and all spill coffee on him—at the same time. We could coordinate it, all three of us walking down the hall together like Charlie’s Angels, and then whammo!”

She hates having to say it, but: “No, we really couldn’t.”

“He can’t have us arrested for spilling coffee.”

“That plan simply… would not work for me.”

“You’ll dump java on _me_ but not on some guy you hate because he was mean to Myka? Hey, wait a minute.”

“All right,” she says.

“This isn’t making sense.”

What does he know he can’t possibly know only three people know and that is all—“Well, no,” Helena manages, “in that we were speaking for a moment as if evisceration were a sensible option.”

“No, I mean it isn’t making sense that Myka didn’t tell me about the Nate thing.”

“Perhaps she’s over it.” Helena congratulates herself for sounding _extremely_ reasonable on the point.

But Pete makes a face. “Myka doesn’t get over stuff real fast. Well. Not usually.”

“If you say so. You have known her longer than—”

“Wait a minute.”

“I thought I was already in the process of waiting a minute.”

“She told you about this Nate thing.”

“Yes.”

“So that must mean it’s you!”

“What is?”

“The getting over stuff thing.”

“Pete, if you could explain what in the world you are talking about, I would appreciate it very much.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t think Myka would.”

Helena crosses her arms, tries to fashion herself into a tough interrogator. “Why does she have concerns about me?”

“My lips are sealed.”

“They weren’t a few moments ago.”

Now he raises his coffee cup to hide behind it. “Seriously. She’ll kill me.”

Helena sighs. “I don’t want you dead. I’m not quite sure why this is so, but it is. And since I have this somewhat positive feeling for you, perhaps you could reciprocate it by… giving me a hint?”

Pete hunches his shoulders. It’s his “thinking hard” pose, and Helena usually finds it entertaining. Now she finds it maddening, and she wishes that giving him a good shake would make him disgorge all the words he isn’t saying. “Rebound,” he finally says. “But maybe not.”

“That is without doubt the most unhelpful hint I have ever been given.”

“Here, I’ll give you a more unhelpful one: use toothpaste to fix a broken teacup.”

“What?”

“I was maybe four years old? Five? It was the only glue-like thing I could find, and I thought my mom would have no idea I ever broke the thing.”

“Toothpaste.”

“See? Now _that’s_ the most unhelpful hint you’ve ever been given.”

“Thank you?”

“I try to unhelp out.” He pats her shoulder. At least the gesture is reassuring. His words, however, have been another matter entirely…

… and Helena stews over them for hours, sitting in her office— _what in the world does “rebound but maybe not” mean?_ —until Claudia knocks on her office door and, without waiting for an invitation, bursts in. “Hey boss,” she says, “you still auditioning for that percussion ensemble?”

“Sadly, yes,” Helena tells her. Why try to lie? She looks down at her desk and tries not to look up again.

“No good graces action, huh?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Did she turn you down?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t get it.”

Now Helena does look up. “She recently ended a serious relationship. It is so difficult for you to understand the concept of sensitivity?”

“Sensitivity to what? Initial conditions? Cold? Heat? Gluten? I understand a lot of kinds of sensitivity.”

“Sensitivity to another human being’s feelings.”

“Nah, that one just sounds like noise. You _sure_ your sensitivity isn’t gluten-related? A lot of things are these days. Anyway, Miss Sensitivity, I got you a present.” Claudia hands Helena an off-white coffee mug that reads, in stark black letters, “good graces = pants.” She admonishes, “Don’t break it.”

Helena hefts the mug. It is heavy and has a matte finish; her hand likes the feel of the unslick surface. “I would love to obey that order, but I suspect it will prove impossible. I should keep toothpaste on hand,” she sighs.

“Minty-fresh breath might help with the good graces thing, yeah.” Claudia turns around, opens the office door, and calls, “Hey, Myka! C’mon in, she isn’t busy!”

“You’re joking,” Helena says, because _obviously_ Claudia _must_ be joking—

Myka pokes her head in.

Helena drops the mug, but instead of breaking when it hits the floor, it bounces.

Claudia cries, “Score!” She picks up the unbroken mug from the floor in front of her and displays it, game-show style, with “ooh” and “aah” sound effects, before settling it on Helena’s desk. “Awesome new polymer.”

Myka asks, “What does ‘good graces equals pants’ mean?”

“It’s a code thing,” Claudia says.

“Computer code?”

Claudia shakes her head. “No, this is boss-specific. But she probably wouldn’t want me to _get into_ it.” Claudia cackles, then ducks out of the office.

“Okay,” Myka says, watching her go. Then she turns to Helena and says, “Hi.”

“Hi,” Helena says back to her. How is it that one syllable—when she is saying it to Myka—can be both so meaningful and so inadequate?

Claudia inserts her head and torso back through the door. “Boss, catch!” she yells as she throws a child-size Nerf football in Helena’s direction. Helena bobbles it, settles it vaguely in her hands, then drops it. She glares loudly at Claudia, who responds with a completely unrepentant “This is my new favorite game.”

“You’re fired,” Helena tells her.

“No I’m not.”

Helena sighs. “No, you’re not. I’m so sorry, Myka, to have involved you in this… game.”

Myka looks between the two of them. Her smile is, as usual, faintly bemused. “I don’t think I fully understand the game.”

“I pray you never do,” Helena says. She waves Claudia out, and to her surprise, Claudia does in fact leave, but not before she has sing-songed “Get-in-to-it, get-in-to-it” followed by record-scratching noises and finger-snaps.

Myka says, “So your resident hip-hop star there said you wanted to see me?”

Helena thinks, as fully articulated words in her head, _Of course I wanted to see you. I always want to see you._ But she says, “I believe Claudia misinterpreted something I said. At an earlier time.”

“Oh,” Myka says, and for a wild moment Helena thinks there is something that sounds like disappointment in _that_ one syllable.

Helena says, to keep her there, to keep her talking, to assuage any disappointment, if that was what she had heard, “Are you, in truth, over it?” She means the Nate incident, but she realizes as soon as the words leave her mouth that, as an uncontextualized question, they make no sense.

But the question is worse than nonsensical: it is quite obviously _completely_ misunderstood, for Myka blushes. “Oh my god, Pete told you, didn’t he? I’ll just die of embarrassment right here.”

“Pete told me nothing,” Helena says. She is not sure whether to be pleased about that, now that she knows it is something that might truly embarrass Myka. She adds, as a small attempt at reassuring humor, “Certainly nothing that should worry you, unless of course you find it worrying that he so rarely _explains_ the random words he utters.” _Why were you talking about rebounds_ , she yearns to ask. _And tell me why maybe not_ , she yearns to demand.

“Then what are you asking about?”

“Nate’s poor judgment.”

“Oh,” Myka says, and again Helena wonders about disappointment. “Oh! I guess I actually am over that, mostly. Fuming at you about it… that helped. I’m still not a fan of his or anything. For the proposal thing…” She pauses. “And for the thing at the bar, with you. Really not a fan.”

“Nor am I. I have one of _his_ proposals in my inbox right now, and I am no fan of it either.”

Myka looks down, then glances up through her lashes. Helena considers how silly it will seem if she swoons, right here in her own office. “We should start a club,” Myka says. “Then you could be my awesome Not-a-Fan-of-Nate-Club buddy.”

Helena now considers that swooning is a not unrealistic response to this level of charm. She chokes out, “Now you’re the one who sounds surprisingly like Pete.”

“I find that a surprisingly satisfactory state of affairs, too.”

“An additional club, perhaps? For those who sound surprisingly like Pete and find it surprisingly satisfactory?”

Myka offers Helena not a smile, but a mischievous lift of eyebrows. “We should invite Pete to our first club meeting as a surprise guest speaker.”

This strikes Helena as absolutely hilarious. She starts laughing, starts and continues, tries to speak, can’t manage a single word; and at first, in response, Myka puts on her half-smile, but then it grows into a full smile, and then she is laughing too, huge gales of laughter that match Helena’s, honks of hilarity that bring tears to her eyes. They are both wiping moisture from their faces by the time they are calming and fading to chuckles.

But as they fade, they founder, for Helena does not know what to say, and Myka is apparently similarly stuck. Wordless seconds tick by, and their shared strong laughter, now subsided, takes on greater intimacy, its physicality looming as more significant, and Helena does not need Leena and Abigail to explain precisely what latent, or not so latent, desires these paroxysms might have masked. Helena is struck anew, and askew, by how physical her response to Myka is… which is not to say that that is _all_ it is, but that is _how_ it is.

As she said to Claudia, she is trying to be sensitive—trying to ignore her own physical sensitivity, that is, in favor of a more empathetic emotional state—so as not to crater the best possibility of whatever this burgeoning thing between them could become. If she moves too quickly, she might jeopardize it, for Pete had said the word “rebound,” and although Helena would, she supposes, be willing to serve as Myka’s rebound relationship, her rebound _anything_ , just to gain, even once, the privilege of dropping all physical pretense, she does not want to _stop_ at that. Yet the possible outcomes seem all equally ruinous: she moves too quickly and loses even these opportunities to laugh, to feel giddy in Myka’s presence… or she gains, at most, something that is itself quick, something that will fall apart because of the dangers inherent in rebounding (polymerized coffee mug notwithstanding). So she has no choice but to move slowly, and that only in whatever direction Myka is willing to lead… and if what that means is that she must drop literally everything as she waits to see where Myka wants to go, then, well, so be it. She will buy industrial-strength technological gadgetry and unbreakable receptacles of all sorts, and she will never, ever attempt to consume or convey liquids anywhere near where Myka is likely to present herself. Workarounds. She is willing to put into place quite a number of workarounds. Good graces have to be, she thinks, every bit as important as pants. No: _more important_ than pants.

Helena watches Myka’s mouth move—and tries not to think about the _conceptual distance between_ good graces and pants—as she says, “So I’ll see you at next Tuesday’s diversity committee meeting, I guess.”

“If not before?” Helena says quickly, for next Tuesday suddenly seems infinitely far away.

“If not before.” Myka smiles, and even after she has taken her leave, her smile lingers in the space, keeping company with the answering smile on Helena’s face.

Helena forces herself to sit down at her desk again, forces herself to think about work. She opens Nate’s staffing proposal document; she pages through it. _Not a fan_ , Helena thinks, and then she thinks, of course, of her awesome Not-a-Fan-of-Nate-Club buddy. She pages through the document again. Then she looks at the coffee mug that declares “good graces = pants.” She drops it from no large height onto her desk, and it once again bounces, very close to directly back into her hand. She holds it, considering. She leans forward, a bit across her desk, grips it as she would if it were a full cup, and then lets her hold slacken. The mug bounces off the edge of the desk and lands, upside down, in the chair that a visitor would occupy.

She wonders if she should be worried that she not only occasionally sounds like Pete, but also has apparently begun to think like him. And then she starts laughing again, because she is surprisingly fine with both of those states of affairs.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want a mug like that, I mean it can say the thing on it and that would be fine, but what I really want is a substantial one that can withstand abuse, and also it needs to be microwaveable, as I am an inveterate coffee-reheater, as well as a cup-dropper, actually I'm pretty adept at dropping lots of things, though not in response to any particular person's presence, however I did once knock a telephone off a desk in front of a girl I (later realized I) had a crush on, and this was in the days when telephones were big heavy things that were connected to walls and also to themselves via wires and cords, on the plus side they never needed to be charged, but the bad news is that they made dramatically loud noises when knocked off desks


	5. Chapter 5

Once again, Helena is out with Abigail—once again _just_ Abigail, contrary to their original plans—for once again, Leena’s daughter is ailing, and once again, Leena cannot abandon her to a sitter. Helena tries not to begrudge little Sophia her mother’s presence, but she does herself feel deprived of Leena’s presence. She particularly, and selfishly, feels deprived of the way that that presence tempers Abigail’s tendency to mock Helena without mercy.

Nevertheless: “I am about to do something extremely foolish,” Helena confesses to Abigail.

“Hallelujah,” Abigail assures her.

“An _actual_ friend would try to dissuade me.”

“Then go find yourself an _actual_ friend if that’s what you want. Me, I say hallelujah. I don’t even know what you’re about to do, and I _still_ say hallelujah, which in fact _is_ the mark of an actual friend. As an aside, though, I don’t think a ‘friend’ of any kind is really what you want.”

“Oh, what does ‘want’ truly mean, in any case?” Helena knows she sounds petulant. She _feels_ petulant. She also feels in dire need of a drink far stronger than the glass of chardonnay that is standing and sweating beside her salad plate.

“In _any_ case,” Abigail is taunting her, “in _any_ case? What about in _this_ case? _You_ should be telling _me_ what ‘want’ truly means. You’re the one with the hands, cutie.” She pauses. “Actually, no, I take it back.”

“I don’t in fact have hands?”

“No, it’s the ‘cutie’ part I’m taking back. You’re not the cute one. The girl who’s apparently making you question what ‘want’ really means, _she’s_ the cute one.”

“So which one does that make me?”

“That’s a great question. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Oh, please do,” Helena says, with acerbity. She knows she is handing Abigail an opportunity to be insulting—which Abigail loves—and she wishes she had some insult receptacle that, once full, she would be able to brandish at Abigail in triumph: “You reached your monthly quota last Wednesday!” But of course Abigail would most likely claim that exceeding her quota should earn her a bonus…

Now Abigail is saying, “I mean you’re obviously not the athletic one… or the smart one… I guess you could be the one with the glossy hair.”

“Not cute,” Helena complains. “Not smart.”

“These are objective categories. I can tell you recognize that, because you didn’t even dispute the fact that you aren’t the athletic one. And I can’t help it if she outranks you in every arena but hair glossiness.”

This sends Helena into gloom. “But then what precisely am I to offer her? ‘Hello, Myka, please take me on, for I have glossy hair. I also, as a bonus, have malfunctioning hands’?”

“Both those things are true. And I think it’s important to be truthful with someone you want to, you know, whatever verb the kids are using for it now.”

“Court?” It’s nothing more than an attempt—a feeble one—to stop the Abigail-inappropriateness train.

“Right. That’s what your hands are screaming for: courting. Seriously, where do you find the things you say?”

“The dictionary. No, better: polite society. Of which you are obviously unaware.”

Abigail starts laughing. “Says the woman who’s done at least one thing with another woman in a public restroom that I’m pretty sure is _still_ illegal in most states. Even in the privacy of your own home.”

“I’m ninety-nine percent certain that’s now legal in one’s own home.”

“I think you’re missing my point.”

“Moreover, it was years ago, as you well know, and everyone involved was extremely intoxicated.”

“I think you’re still missing my point.”

“Additionally, I have far too much respect for Myka to even begin to want to do anything with her in a public restroom.”

“Liar. If she showed up here right now and said ‘Hey, glossy-haired one, let’s go _court_ in that lockable little room over there,’ you wouldn’t even be able to _define_ ‘respect.’ And anyway, now you’re just _pretending_ to miss my point.”

“Then you should stop trying to make it, whatever it was.”

“Yeah, I don’t remember either. But listen, glossy-haired one, a point I’m pretty sure is at least related to the original one is that you’ve managed to parlay that glossy hair into _courting_ before.” Abigail chuckles. “ _Courting_ ,” she repeats, and chuckles again. “Where’d Claudia get that personalized, polymerized mug you told me about, anyway?”

Helena senses that she will most likely at some point in the near future find herself the proud and/or mortified owner of yet another coffee cup, one that proclaims “courting = [some incredibly vulgar term that Helena will have to look up in the Urban Dictionary]”. She sighs and says, “Any previous parlaying of my hair’s glossiness into… _courting_ wasn’t hindered by the malfunctioning hands.”

“Your stupid hands really don’t have anything to do with anything. Why don’t you just be your suave self? I’ve been your wingman often enough to know how well that works.”

“But she seems to turn me into someone else. Evidence: the malfunctioning hands.”

“Okay, fine, then, be a _butterfingered facsimile_ of your suave self. I’m not saying you can actually be the suave one, either, by the way.”

“My tombstone will evidently read ‘Here lies Helena Wells: the one that was neither cute, nor athletic, nor smart, nor suave, in comparison to Myka Bering.’” Although now that Helena has heard herself say those things out loud, they do seem rather… correct. She sighs. “I suppose you’re right in the end.”

“Of course I am. Look, the important thing is, you’re not bored, are you?”

“No. I’m destroying almost everything I touch, rather violently, but I’m certainly not bored.”

“See? And you didn’t even have to get a dog. Just a Myka.”

“I did not ‘get’ a Myka.”

Abigail smiles. She smiles like she knows something.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Helena asks. She doesn’t expect an answer—Abigail may not actually have anything to say, but she will never, ever tire of tormenting Helena.

Abigail puts on a show of considering. Helena downs most of her remaining half-glass of wine during the performance… as it shows no signs of abating, however, she begins to tap a fingernail very softly against the nearly empty glass, making a tiny ting-ting-ting noise. Abigail fights her annoyance for a while, then finally says, “One thing I _am_ telling you is that if Myka _were_ here, I’d be proposing a toast so you’d pick that glass up and then drop it so it busted and you could never play your irritating little symphony on it again. Besides, broken glass makes everything more fun.”

“Have _that_ motto put on an unbreakable coffee mug for me,” Helena requests. Perhaps that will forestall courting being equated with anything.

“Irony at its finest,” Abigail agrees.

“You still haven’t told me what you haven’t told me.”

A smaller show this time, then: “Fine. One big thing is that Sophia’s probably going to have to get tubes in her ears. For the infections, and she’s really giving Leena pushback on it. I feel bad for her.”

“For Leena or for Sophia?”

“Honestly? Both. Leena desperately needs some sleep, but Sophia’s in a lot of actual pain.”

Helena realizes later that she let the ear infections distract her, for Abigail had taken out her telephone to search for information regarding some earache-easing pillow she claims to have read about, one that they might buy for Sophia and thus in turn ease _Leena’s_ pain a bit, and then she and Helena had lost themselves in showing each other more and more outrageous products for sleep enhancement. They hadn’t spoken of Myka again, and Helena, in retrospect, sees that the knowledge she failed to gain, right then, that night, was the beginning of her complete undoing.

****

In the morning, to bear out her statement to Abigail regarding her extremely foolish intention, she calls Nate and asks him to stop by her office, perhaps around eleven? “I’d like to discuss the IT costing section of the proposal under review,” she says. She congratulates herself on her polite tone.

When he arrives, she wastes no time. “Nate,” she says with what she hopes is rather dismissive disapproval, “you _must_ put the skill tracks in the staffing matrix, _and_ you must change every track based on the proposed move to cloud-based services. It does no hire any good at all to know advanced functions of Word if they are intended to work solely in Google docs.”

“Come _on_ ,” Nate says. “You couldn’t have told me this in an email? Unless…”

“Unless what?” Helena asks. _Oh god_ , she thinks. She cannot _possibly_ have quashed this with both Myka and Pete only to have it come back with the original article, as it were. She and Nate interact so little, he cannot possibly think… but fine. She will make it absolutely clear. “Believe me, if I had thought it possible to address via email all my concerns regarding your work, I would have done so.”

“Come _on_ ,” he repeats. “Those skill tracks were a cut and paste. You know exactly what every single thing means.”

“It cannot go out the door this way,” Helena maintains. This, she could have said in an email, but it is also absolutely true. “There is such a thing as perception, and—”

“Even if it does go out the door, the client will know what every single thing means too,” he interrupts.

Helena thinks, _If we were together, not that we would be, I would certainly be the smart one. Cute as well, and possibly even athletic_. She says, with exaggerated patience, “Nate, the point is not whether anyone will or will not know what you _mean_. I simply would prefer that none of our clients labor under the misapprehension that my department cannot distinguish between—or rather, fails to take the time to distinguish between—Microsoft and Google.”

“Right on, boss!” enthuses a voice from outside Helena’s office.

“Stop listening at the door, or I will fire you!”

Claudia pokes her head in: “No you won’t.”

“No, I won’t.” Now for the next piece of the plan. “And I’d like to get another perspective on this. Claudia, would you be so kind as to ask Myka to join us? Since you have so much time on your hands?” She has already ascertained that Myka is likely to be free around eleven-fifteen. In the process of asking, she had dropped only a costume-jewelry ring—she’d thought she’d approached Myka empty-handed, but apparently she has a tendency to remove the rather large ring from her finger and twiddle it when nervous. The things one learns. “What’s going on?” Myka had asked, and Helena, who had not thought quite far enough ahead to be able to answer well, said merely, “a surprise,” in response to which Myka smiled a skeptical smile. An eminently kissable skeptical smile. In response to which, in turn, Helena dropped her ring again.

Now Claudia says, “Time on my hands. Hands. That’s funny.”

Nate asks a confused, “It is?”

Claudia cackles. She slams the door closed.

Helena continues to say words about cost structures, about cross-coverage of key IT positions, about position assignment policies… she stalls until she hears a knock on the door. She feels her mouth begin to curve into a smile as she says “Come in,” and she stands up, leans forward—exactly as she planned, as if she were about to emphasize a point—and then Myka is there. She is there, and she is looking from Helena to Nate with great interest. She is there, and for the first time, Helena’s hands do exactly what she intends: they lose their grip on the “good graces = pants” cup.

The beginning of Helena’s plan unfolds perfectly, as the cup slips from Helena’s fingers—and no one could think Helena has dropped it on purpose, though Myka will most likely think that, but the important element is that Nate not see it that way—as the small amount of coffee it contains remains in place, poised to be bounced in precisely the direction Helena envisioned, in the instant when the cup initiates its turn toward the chair, the flip it will execute right as it hits the corner of the desk and—

 

Fifteen minutes later:

“‘Awesome new polymer,’ you said!” Helena fumes at Claudia.

“‘ _Flawless_ new polymer,’ I _didn’t_ say!” Claudia protests. “Trust you to magically find its shatter eigenvalue or whatever.”

“I could have killed him! All those shards, flying straight at his—”

Myka says, hurriedly, “Well, killed his chances for future children, anyway.”

“But you didn’t,” Claudia points out.

“I’m not sure that truly improves the situation,” Helena says without thinking.

This makes Myka offer a delicate snort. “No argument here,” she says.

In the face of that comment, Helena finds it increasingly difficult to maintain her severity with Claudia. “Worse,” she struggles to say with a straight face, “I might have killed _Myka_. Who was standing _right beside him_.”

Claudia has the decency to wince. “Okay, that does seem worse.”

“From my perspective, at least,” Myka notes.

“Mine as well,” Helena affirms. “And do you know, Claudia, what strikes me as even worse than that?” Claudia shakes her head. “Your eigenvalue claim. Implausible at best.” Helena crosses her arms and waits.

Claudia’s show is very nearly Abigailesque in its lengthy drama, but she finally gives in. “Oh all right. Yes. Yes, I wanted to mess with you. It’s a different mug. Well. It _was_ a different mug. Now it’s just a mess. I mean, what’s left of it in here is. Although I guess the part that walked out embedded in Nate’s pants is too. Anyway, how was I supposed to know you were gonna… do whatever weird thing you were doing? _You_ called Myka in here. _You_ had it in your hand. And _you_ had to have known what that would mean.”

Helena says, with venom, “ _Vengeance_ , Claudia. I was seeking retributive justice.”

“On his pants? What did his pants ever do to you?” Claudia demands.

Myka slaps her hand over her mouth, but tiny chortles emerge. Helena feels a completely unstoppable smile overtake her own face, right as Claudia continues, “Okay, yes, I did just realize how that sounded. Particularly given the code, I realize how that sounded.”

Helena tightens the cross of her arms. Given her inability to stop smiling, the gesture is anything but stern. “And how did it sound?”

“Like I’m fired,” Claudia says with good cheer.

Helena nods. “Exactly.”

“So I guess I better get back to work.”

“Exactly.”

Myka waits until Claudia has clicked the door closed before saying, “Okay, let me in on it. What, exactly, was the plan?”

Helena rolls her eyes at herself. Articulating it now seems beyond silly, the whole thing _well_ beyond foolish.

“Come on,” Myka says. Helena likes the sound of those words a great deal more from her mouth than from Nate’s. “It can’t be worse than what actually happened, can it?”

“It can be more petty,” Helena tells her. “But all right: first, the minuscule amount of coffee remaining in my cup would have, when the cup bounced, landed on him—as would, may I add, the _unbroken_ cup. I intended the coffee to be just enough to cause embarrassment, not sufficient to fully end the meeting. And then I had a variety of tactics planned. For instance, I would have been far more interested in your words than his. That’s objectively the case, of course, but I would have made it _very obvious_. Then, had he interrupted you—which he would have done, for as I’m sure you know, he is a serial interrupter—I would have shushed him. Authoritatively.”

“Authoritative shushing on my behalf,” Myka says. “Gallant.”

“If you did not beat me to it,” Helena hurries to add, to prevent herself from reacting to “gallant.” “Also, if he had miraculously managed to say anything of any value, I would have waited for _you_ to rephrase it and suggest it again. Then I would have praised it.”

“You’re a terrible person,” Myka tells her.

“I can’t dispute the characterization.”

“And it’s the sweetest thing anybody’s ever not quite done for me.”

Sweetest. Sweetest. Helena had managed to dodge “gallant,” and she tries to duck under “sweetest” too, tries not to let herself dwell on the word, but she is dwelling, dwelling—she is setting up _housekeeping_ there, very nearly, even as she tries to discipline her tone sufficiently to respond. “I realize,” she says, “as plans go, it wasn’t at all well-planned.” This is at least true. “I should have coordinated with you to begin with, not tried to surprise you, no matter how pleasant I intended the surprise to be. I also realize it wasn’t technically an evisceration—though it did come much closer, in the literal sense, than I imagined it would. Nor, unfortunately, was it a barbecue during which he was roasted on a spit, nor even a straightforward keying of his car, both of which Pete suggested.”

“You’re the best partner in crime I ever didn’t actually have,” Myka says. She says it so gently… so, yes, _sweetly_.

And Helena thinks, _You can have me. If you want me, you can have me. Just ask, and you can have me_. She clears her throat. “Well. I think we both had reason to want some revenge.”

“I guess we—” Myka stops. She stops, and she smiles. “Will you tell me why you were so upset?”

Some aspect of that smile reminds Helena of Abigail’s from last night: Myka knows something. Helena clears her throat again. “Upset about what?”

“My thinking that you were with him.”

“No one takes pleasure in the idea of someone having an inaccurate picture of who one… is. Is _with_. Is with _or_ is.” _When it matters_ , Helena adds in her head. _When the someone is you_.

“I guess not. But usually they don’t jump straight to evisceration. Do they?”

Helena has no answer for that, other than to mentally repeat herself: _They do when it matters_. She thinks she should have tried to say something aloud, though, when Myka smiles again, smiles and says, “You know, I was talking to Pete.”

“I’m sure you were,” Helena chokes out. “As you do.”

“Let me clarify: I was talking to Pete about _you_.”

“Oh?” Another choked syllable.

“I also was talking to your friends Abigail and Leena about you.”

 _Oh no_. _Oh_ no. _Oh no no no no no_. Abigail’s smile. _Myka’s_ smile. Helena realizes that she is staring, and that Myka is looking back with some expectation, as if she wants Helena to produce _words_ rather than simply a facial expression of abject horror. “Oh no,” is all Helena can manage at first, and Myka smiles some more. Helena finally gives in to what she supposes must be a kind of… trepidatory curiosity. “All right,” she says. “What did they say?”

“I don’t think I’ll tell you. Instead, I’ll ask you something.”

“What’s that?”

Myka looks down at Helena’s desk. She reaches out a hand and picks up the first item she touches. She offers it to Helena. She asks, “Could you hold this for me?”

Helena had not known, prior to this moment, that anyone, and certainly not she herself, could be so terrified of a pocket dictionary.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original Tumblr tags: honestly if I could do everything at once I would, and anyway I'd much rather be writing vaguely comedic (or serious or somewhere inbetween) B&W than just about anything else, but not tragic, no not tragic, not today or any other day, because I feel like that waterfront has pretty much been covered in the girls-who-dig-girls category, especially lately


	6. Chapter 6

Helena stares at the dictionary. She dares a glance at Myka’s face: but would Helena know mockery, to look at it, on Myka’s face? Myka is generally so sincere… if she wants to laugh at Helena, though, she will do it, regardless of what Helena says or does. So Helena shakes her head. “Could I hold that for you,” she echoes. “Most likely, no. Alas.”

“Why not?” Again, there seems to be no undertone, even though Myka _must_ know the answer to that question. Having talked to Abigail and Leena, Myka _must_ know.

So if Myka knows, what could Helena hope to gain by denial or obfuscation? “All right, I will say it out loud. Out loud and to you: you make me drop things. In your presence, I drop things.”

Myka regards the dictionary in her own hand. She sets it back down, lightly, on the desk. “That seems out of character.”

“You have no idea.”

“I have _some_ idea,” Myka says. “It isn’t as if you’re a completely unknown quantity.”

“I’m not?”

“We’ve known each other for a long time. Years.”

“We’ve known _of_ each other for a long time. That is not the same thing.”

“You always made me… look twice, though. A quiet double take.” Myka tilts her head, as if to get a glimpse of then-Helena, occasioner of muted second looks. 

Helena mourns not having known, then, that Myka had looked even once, and then more than once. “But not enough of one,” she says, and she can’t keep her regret inaudible. “Or not enough of two. Or whatever it is I mean.” She very nearly regrets not having taken hold of the dictionary, for the brief seconds she could have done so, because she might be able to cover this new embarrassment—her words were so _open_ —by hiding behind her desk under the pretense of retrieving it.

Myka looks down at the book. She runs her fingers across its cover, and now Helena adds to her list of things she had not known about pocket dictionaries: that anyone could be so covetous of an experience had by one. Myka says, without looking up, “Maybe it wasn’t the right time. Or maybe I mean the right time _yet_.”

“That suggests.” Helena stops and coughs. “That suggests that at some time, there will be—might be—a right time.”

Now Myka looks up. Her gaze is guileless. “What do you think about that? As a suggestion?”

And Helena has no choice but to be straightforward in return. She says, “I think that I also have talked to several people about _you_.”

“And what did they tell you?”

“Do you want me to be honest?”

Myka blinks. “I don’t want you to be anything _but_ honest.”

If she does not mean it, best to find out now. “All right then. Pete told me ‘rebound but maybe not,’ a statement that I tried mightily to decipher but no doubt have interpreted quite wrongly. Claudia told me ‘good graces = pants,’ which I will refrain from explaining so as to retain some vestigial bit of dignity. And just yesterday my now-former friend Abigail told me that I need to be my suave self.”

“You mean up to now you haven’t been?”

“Oh god no.”

“You can be suaver than _this_?”

“I certainly hope so.”

“I won’t survive it,” Myka declares.

“You’re joking.”

Myka blinks again. Ostentatiously. Helena leans forward: prior to this moment, she had not fully appreciated the intricacy with which the green of Myka’s eyes mingles with sunburnt hazel… and then Myka is saying, “The dropping things thing is pretty suave.”

Helena, still staring into those eyes, manages, “It is not. It is hideously embarrassing.”

“I don’t know.” Myka gives a little shrug. It is accompanied by an eyebrow-raise and a brief, but moonshine-strong, curl of a smile. “It could be useful.”

“Useful… useful?”

“I think so.” There’s the shrug again, the eyebrows, the lips rising at the corners—all of it together a zap of electricity. The hair on the back of Helena’s neck prickles at her as Myka says, “Let’s say you’ve just, oh, I don’t know, removed some article of clothing.”

“In… your presence?” Helena’s mouth is suddenly very, very dry.

“In my presence. Actually, just for fun, let’s say it’s an article of _my_ clothing.”

Are these the actual words Myka is saying? Surely Helena is mishearing. “Your clothing… yours?”

“Right. So then, if I understand the situation correctly, you’d drop that article of clothing.”

“I… would?”

“Onto the floor,” Myka says, and Helena now must be hallucinating Myka’s new, larger smile, a crescent of wicked mirth. “It might even be the floor of, maybe, my bedroom.”

“It… might?”

“Or yours. I don’t want to be dictatorial about where anything happens.”

Helena cannot begin to imagine what her own face is revealing to Myka. “I have learned one thing, thus far, in the course of this conversation,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“That I need intense tutoring in suavity.”

“Is that even a word?”

“I have no idea.” Helena can barely _form_ words, much less judge whether, once formed, they _qualify_ as such. “Not only do you make me drop things, you make me rewrite the dictionary.”

“I’ve never made anybody do either of those things before.”

Helena is the one raising her eyebrows now. “I don’t see why not.”

“Also nobody’s ever kept on doing those things in order to… what were you doing? Giving me space?”

“I didn’t want to pressure you.”

Myka says, thoughtfully, “But to spare Pete’s tie, maybe you should have.”

“I don’t believe that Pete’s tie should be my first concern, where you are concerned.”

“Claudia’s Nerf football?” Myka offers.

“It didn’t break.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?” Helena asks.

It’s a question but not a real one, yet Myka leans forward, over the desk, and kisses Helena. Soft, swift, a one-word kiss, one word something like “this”—that’s how Myka meant it, Helena can feel it, but their mouths catch and hold just as their hands, just as their gazes. The one word becomes two, “this and,” becomes three, “this and linger,” “this and linger and”—and Myka pulls away, before any further contents of the dictionary involve themselves.

“Point made?” Myka asks, her tone a bit less playful than before—she is really asking.

Helena, for whom the kiss has assuaged a worry, one whose true gaping extent had somehow eluded her understanding prior to Myka’s lips meeting hers, says, “How any point you have ever made in any context _whatsoever_ could be misunderstood or criticized, I can’t imagine.”

The bounce returns to Myka’s voice as she says, “And that’s why I like you better than I like Nate.”

“ _That’s_ why?”

Myka leans forward again, whispers, “Maybe one or two other reasons,” and kisses Helena again.

This kiss is less of a surprise—but Helena still feels a shock at receiving it, at being part of it, at the way she can be in such a daze yet still move her mouth, at her ability to feel entirely present in this overwhelmingly physical moment yet still understand the weight of the years that she has wanted and longed and wished to be here, right here, in it. This is not as if someone has said “what do you want for your birthday” and she has answered this book or that sweater and she has been given this book or that sweater and she has enjoyed whatever gift of course because she asked and she received. No, this is the want she has disclosed to no one, the secret wish made on birthday candles… but not even that: it is the wish hidden behind the one made on those candles, or made on that shooting star. This is the longing want that she dared not call into being lest she startle it away.

How silly to have been brought to such a perfect moment of physicality by a physical failure. Her hapless hands…

How silly to be thinking that anything about this moment is at all silly.

How silly to pull away from Myka—but Helena does it, because the moment is threatening, once again, to become far more than that.

Despite the fact that her mouth is entirely her own again, Helena finds the making of sensical sounds quite difficult. She clears her throat. “So we’ve established that one or both of us has a bedroom.” She is aiming for some aspect that might pass as suave. She cannot possibly have achieved it.

Myka, though, says, “We have. I think we should get into a car and go to one of those places. Once the workday ends, I mean.”

Helena tries again: “My car. Yours is unreliable.”

“Hey! They fixed it. I paid money.” Myka’s smile, now, is indignantly humorous. And now what Helena cannot imagine is how anyone could have such a vast arsenal of gleaming facial expressions… with an exaggerated huff, Myka goes on, “Besides, can you even drive if I’m in the car with you? Won’t you drop the steering wheel or something?”

“The steering wheel is _affixed_.” All right, yes, Helena can at least still do “aggrieved.”

“I think you underestimate yourself. Particularly given what just happened to Nate’s lap.”

“Claudia _punked_ me.”

“She did do that. You should give her a bonus.”

“For punking me?”

“For what just happened to Nate’s lap. And for how that gave us a push toward what might happen later. Why don’t I come back here around five and see whether we’re still on the same page?” Myka takes up the dictionary, opens it, leafs through. She seems to find what she is looking for and begins to hand the volume to Helena, but then she draws her arm back. “Whoops, sorry, forgot. Anyway, try this page.” She tents the book on the desk and offers Helena a final smile, this one glinting only quick mischief, with seemingly no underlying lascivity. “Lascivity?” Helena says to herself, out loud, in part to quash her regret at the sudden lack of Myka’s presence. Surely it should be “lasciviousness.” Myka _does_ make her rewrite the dictionary.

Helena picks up the book. Now that she can, without consequence. It is open to somewhere in the C’s, and Helena is very much afraid, given that Myka has spoken with Abigail, that these two pages will contain the word… yes, so they do: “court.” Though Helena supposes Myka could be referring to a coup d’état. Or couponing. Or a courtmartial. Perhaps couture. Then again—she runs her finger back, from right to left—the pages also feature courtesan… coupling… and countertop, which is a flat, horizontal surface that she _must not think about_ , not until the workday is over and probably not even then.

For the next five hours, she thinks of next to nothing. Nothing but flat, horizontal surfaces. And what might be done on them.

****

The end of the day finds Helena overstrung, unable to perform even a vague facsimile of herself. She is barely able to breathe. A tap on the door, an exhaled “come in,” and there Myka is, standing as she would stand at any other time, on any other day, as if this were not the watershed—so perhaps it is not?

Is not? Is? But Myka is still standing there, so Helena leans over to take her bag’s handles into her hand, then thinks better of it. She must look so comical, in her panicked indecision… Myka will change her mind now, if she has not changed it already.

But Myka slings her own bag over her shoulder, and without saying a word, she picks up Helena’s attaché and carries it for her.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original Tumblr tags: I just like it when Myka gives Helena a hard time, because it isn't really a hard time, I mean I think both of them are going to end up reasonably happy with how things turn out, if maybe a little stupefied, speaking of words, I do love 'stupefied,' also 'smitten' is a good one, I still like 'bedazzled' too, despite the unfortunate association with rhinestones


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to say some stuff about dialogue outtakes and whatever, but process is my problem, not yours. So here, have a bunch of self-indulgent, overly precious talky talking.

Myka does have to drive—Helena tries again to bring up the matter of unreliable vehicles, but she is forced to concede that she might in fact, given her now-anticipatory hands, somehow contrive a way to drop her own car’s steering wheel, not to mention its gearshift, emergency brake, and door handle. And yet when Myka says, “My place, then,” Helena responds, “No, mine.” She is not sure why it is important, but it is. “Please,” she adds.

“Of course,” Myka says. “Whatever you want.”

Want… Helena had said words to Abigail yesterday, _yesterday_ , about not knowing what “want” means, jokingly petulant words, and now she has no choice but to laugh at herself in exactly the way Abigail had done. If Myka were to pull the car over right now, that would be sufficient to provide a stage for definition. What does “want” mean? Helena would make clear enough what it has meant, these weeks and months.

Helena does not know why she ever thought she could have driven her car, and she similarly has no idea why she imagined she could have held her keys in any way that would have allowed her to unlock her door. She tries three times, and after the third, Myka picks up the forlorn metal ring from the floor of the porch and says, “Will you let me?”

Helena nods, because as far as she can discern there is _nothing_ that she would not let Myka do tonight.

When the door is at last open, Helena gestures for Myka to precede her, so in Myka goes—and all at once _down_ Myka goes, headlong, pitching forward in a completely graceless tumble, having tripped over… something? Helena sees nothing but her normal doorstep, and yet there Myka lies. No: there Myka _sprawls_ , her long body face down in the foyer.

Helena has a lovely home. But as she looks at the drape of Myka on the floor—Myka is muttering something; Helena cannot tell what—and as she regards the scatter of both their bags, contents spilled, papers and folders and writing implements and small electronics disarrayed as if a supply closet had been turned inside out… something about the loveliness of her home, its surface loveliness, cracks. _This_ is why Helena’s house is where she felt they had to be. This is precisely why. Her home and everything else have just now, in this instant, become unlovely in the way that staggering beauty _must_ be unlovely. Myka belongs here but doesn’t; the space is too large and too small, and how could Helena possibly have lived the way she did before? The beige, yes, but it is not that Myka brings _color_ ; of course she brings those green eyes, that red mouth, today a bright purple shirt. But that is too simple. She brings—Helena tries to stop the thought, but it is true, it is right—she brings violence. Yes, the small, comic violence of everything that has fallen from Helena’s hands… plus, now, this larger fall that Myka herself has just performed. But larger still: Myka brings the fact and the awareness that if things go wrong, they will go so horribly wrong that everything and everyone will be shattered. Yet the reward, if things go right…

For now, though, Myka might already be shattered, in a far more literal sense. “First,” Helena asks, “are you all right?”

“Maybe,” Myka tells the floor under her face.

“I’d say that’s good news, but for my second question: are you making a satirical point at my expense?”

Myka raises her head infinitesimally. “If there’s a satirical point being made, I’m pretty sure it’s at _my_ expense. Or have you fallen down too?”

“I’m neither Leena nor Abigail,” Helena notes.

“True. As far as I can tell.” Myka turns her head in Helena’s direction, squints at her. “I guess you might be a master of disguise.”

Helena continues, “But my range of possible interpretations regarding your apparent intention to knock yourself unconscious is slightly less than charitable.”

“You’re the one who bought the house with the tripping-hazard threshold. So if we’re going to talk about apparent intentions, yours don’t seem to be all that defensible either.”

Helena chuckles. “You buy a house,” she says.

Myka must hear the echo Helena intends, for she exhales a soft “ha.” She sits up.

“You buy a _house_ ,” Helena repeats. “You buy it _new_ … well, no, I can’t truthfully say I bought it new. You buy a house; you buy it used. You maintain it to the best of your ability. You keep it clean. Or somewhat clean; as you’ll see, I’m no overachiever in the realm of tidiness.”

Myka leans back against the wall of the foyer. Her virid eyes put its tasteful taupe to shame. She turns her head to cast those eyes upon the extremely untidily strewn contents of their bags. She sighs. “Neither am I, I guess.”

“I should have kept it far more tidy, if it has chosen to retaliate against me by tripping you as you attempted to cross its threshold. Thus breaking the mood.”

“There was a mood, wasn’t there…”

“It was quite compelling. The mood.”

Myka lets a beat pass. Then she looks up at Helena. “You said it _was_ compelling. What is it now?”

“I’m not sure. You seem to be considering—or reconsidering?—in a way that you were not.”

“That’s not exactly it. I’m just not overly thrilled at having physically demonstrated how nervous I am. About getting this wrong.”

Helena can’t abide the idea of Myka thinking she could be the one to get any of this wrong in any way. Certainly not when it is Helena who has enacted every bit of slapstick foolishness up till now. She goes to Myka, who is still sitting propped against the wall, and kneels down, astride her legs. She puts her mouth to Myka’s, very softly, then pulls back a distance that is far less than polite. “You’re nervous?” she asks. “The woman who spoke about bedroom floors earlier today? You can’t be nervous.”

“I told you, I’m usually the one who outclumsies everybody else, and look, here I am, proving it.”

“‘Outclumsies.’ I neglected to note that you too rewrite the dictionary. I don’t care who outclumsies whom. Just kiss me again.”

“With our luck, I’ll miss. Or even knock out a tooth. Probably one of yours.”

“Modern dentistry is a marvel. Prosthodontics.”

Myka says, with great skepticism, “Is there a word that actually _means_ ‘rewriter of dictionaries’?”

“Prosthodontics _is_ a word. You _can_ look it up. It is a specialty practiced by prosthodontists, and you can look them up too.” Helena stops and considers. “Although I will concede that a prosthodontist sounds as if it might have, say, bestrode the earth. During an ice age.”

“I bet it had huge fake tusks. Anyway, how do I know you haven’t somehow slipped whatever hybrid dentist-beast into all the dictionaries, you… nomendiaskeuast.” Myka tilts her head and moves her mouth into a thoughtful twist. “Does that even work?”

“Hm. I see where you’re going with it, but I—”

“How about with this?” This time, it’s Myka who leans forward to join their mouths. No one loses—or even chips—a tooth, leaving the prosthodontists to slumber on, or perhaps lumber on, undisturbed. “I’d offer to pick you up and carry you to your bedroom, but I don’t want to overpromise,” Myka eventually says.

“Now you _are_ making a satirical point at my expense.”

“Maybe a little bit of one. Here’s a better idea: We should try walking. Just together.”

“May I offer you my arm? So you’re less likely to stumble and fall?”

“Suave. Or satirical?”

“I’m beginning to think that for us, the distance between those ideas is scant. But in this case, neither. I’d just prefer you not be incapacitated.”

“So you’d prefer me… what, capacitated? Why? Got plans for me?”

“Now who’s being suave yet also satirical?” Helena asks, but she pushes herself up from the floor, then reaches a hand back down; Myka takes it and stands too. They manage one step together before falling into an extremely clumsy kiss against the wall. Neither of them, Helena thinks, could be said to have outclumsied the other in initiating the kiss; it happened, and so it goes on happening. Myka’s mouth on Helena’s now restarts the conversation they had begun in the office, still saying “this,” “this and,” “this and linger”… but now there is no need to stop… so they don’t. And they don’t walk to Helena’s bedroom, not really. Instead, they slide and twist in a slow, staggering embrace along the wall until they find what Helena is fairly certain must be the correct doorway. It leads to a room that contains a bed, of that much she is foggily aware, and if anyone cares whose bed this is intended to be? They must not be desperate to be in it with Myka Bering.

****

They discover, through experimentation, that Helena can in fact maintain her grip on articles of clothing that she removes from Myka’s body. They discover also that neither of them wants her to.

****

“We need to try this in my bedroom too. And lots of other rooms in both our places. Location as an independent variable.” Myka is saying these words as breathy movements against Helena’s temple. She sounds exhausted but delighted.

“But consider also the clothing itself,” Helena offers, equally happily. “How many shirts, for example, do you own?”

“Tons. Also hotels.”

“You own hotels?”

“No, I mean for more locations.”

“This experiment is going to take some time.”

“And lots of really physically taxing work,” Myka sighs. “I think it’s important, though. For science.” The word “science” seems to inspire her: Helena receives an extremely deep and rich kiss.

“So do I,” Helena says, and she laughs. “I actually do. For example, I experimented with regard to what I could—or rather, could not—hold while listening to you speak.”

“What? When?”

“You were talking to Claudia outside my office, weeks and weeks ago. I heard your voice and dropped my stapler.”

Myka kisses her.

“Then I picked it up and dropped it again.”

Myka kisses her again.

“Binder clips,” Helena informs her.

Yet again.

“More than one! Three at the very least.”

Three presses of lips, in rapid succession.

“Many, many pens.” Now Helena turns her head and does the kissing, all along Myka’s jaw line.

“What else?” Myka murmurs.

“My telephone charger.” Helena puts her tongue to a somewhat thematically appropriate earlobe. Myka laughs, but also shivers. “And, finally, my chair.” This she celebrates with a voluptuous kiss of Myka’s mouth.

Through which Myka smiles. Then she gives Helena a quizzical look. “You dropped your chair?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you pick up your chair in the first place?”

Helena props herself up on her elbow. “Are you and Claudia psychically connected?” she demands.

“I’m really unclear on what that has to do with your chair, but I’ll play along: no. Not as far as I know.”

“That is a relief.”

“I do remember, one time, hearing noises coming from your office,” Myka muses, “but I didn’t want to pry.”

“I wish Claudia had exercised the same restraint.”

“Let me guess: good graces equals pants?”

“Substantially. I did tell her the truth about my… experiment.”

“Hence the mug. Hence the football.”

“Hence,” Helena agrees. “To something resembling her credit, she did encourage me to take action, based on my… symptoms.”

“Abigail said she encouraged you, too.”

“Will you tell me why you spoke to her and Leena about me? You don’t have to of course.” Helena settles her head back down on Myka’s shoulder. “I don’t want to pry either.”

“I ran into them downtown… hadn’t seen them since I got back.” Myka moves her head a little, or tries to. “Ow. You’re lying on my hair,” she informs Helena.

Helena shifts her position. “Apologies. In my defense, your hair is difficult to avoid in quarters as close as these.”

“It’s a little wild right now,” Myka agrees. “Which isn’t unrelated to my story: Abigail started laughing hysterically the minute she saw me. I asked her if I’d really let myself go that badly while I’d been away—honestly I thought it might’ve been the hair—and she explained that it was about you, not me. Leena tried to shush her, but that had about as much chance of working as… I don’t know. Something with very little chance of working.”

Helena harrumphs. “Abigail’s jaw, as soon as I take boxing lessons and learn how to deliver an uppercut.”

“I think she really does want you to be happy,” Myka says.

“She also wants to make satirical points at my expense.”

“You seem to surround yourself with people who happen to be into that. Is that on purpose?”

“When it’s you. I like being surrounded by _you_.” She means by Myka, just Myka, because Myka is surrounding her right now, holding her, and Helena does like it. She more than likes it. “Will you stay?” she asks.

“Of course. If you don’t mind stopping off at my place in the morning for me to get a change of clothes.”

“It’s true I don’t want to consign you to any sort of walk of shame…”

“Shame? Trust me, I’ll be the opposite of ashamed. That walk would be the walk of immodest pride and satisfaction—but unfortunately also the walk of my clothes need to be dry-cleaned because they’ve been on somebody’s floor all night.” She stops. “You know, you’ve been responsible for a lot of dry-cleaning situations. Do you have some kind of financial stake in that Five Star place off the highway where everybody from work takes their stuff? That’s a franchise, right? I bet you own that one. I bet you do. I’ll even double down and bet that you’re the one who agitated for the dress-code change in the first place.”

“If I had, it would never have been a dry-cleaning-related plot. It would have been so I could see you in your devastatingly attractive business suits every day.”

“You’ve seemed more interested in seeing me out of my business suits. Lately. Besides, I’ll have you know I can wear a pair of jeans pretty well too, which I hope you already know, because of most recently that bowling tournament, when I wore the ones that fit me best, _maybe_ because you were on my team… also partially to balance out the hideousness of the shoes, but—”

“You are failing to understand the precariousness of my state—mental and physical!—at that bowling tournament.”

“It’s not like I was so together.”

“Comparatively, you were as together as… someone or something that would be considered extremely together. I can’t think of a sufficiently impressive example.”

“Us. Now.” Myka says this immediately, as if she had been waiting for such an opportunity. She could not have been, but…

… the idea is warming and frightening and just plain surprising. “Well,” Helena says.

“Oh god. I just meant right now, this minute. Not necessarily, you know, in perpetuity… I mean, not that I don’t want to be, but I don’t want to assume that you would want—”

“Obviously it _is_ too early to say. Too early, and—”

“I know, and I’m sorry, because I—”

“Would you let me finish? It _is_ too early, and yet I don’t _feel as if_ it is too early.” She doesn’t. She feels as if nothing could ever be too _early_ for them. Too _late_ , now, that is a different matter.

Myka pulls Helena just a bit closer. “I don’t either. Maybe it’s because we’ve known each other—okay, known _of_ each other—for so long. And I told you, there’s always been something… since I first met you. I remember, I was going to the library.”

“You were holding books. I remember too.”

“What I also remember is that I had the strongest impulse to ask you to come with me.”

“I wish you had.”

“Weird first date,” Myka says.

“ _Perfect_ first date.”

“Really? ‘Hello, stranger I’ve just met, come to the library with me’?”

“I would have carried your books.”

“With _those_ hands?”

“These hands took _years_ to reach that point. To become so desperate for you as to reach that point.” Helena lifts her free hand—she would show both, but her other arm is positioned half beneath and half behind her body—as a strange sort of Exhibit A.

“I like that point,” Myka says. With her own free hand, she takes Exhibit A and pulls it to her. She kisses the palm, kisses the back, kisses each finger. “Well, I like this point better, but I did like that one.”

Helena knows now that she can _rely_ on her hands when they are on Myka—they have grasped and held and delved and dragged as she meant them to do. This is so very clearly what they want to be doing, where they so very clearly want to be. She is sorely tempted to demand of them, “There was truly no better way to let me know?” But they might very well answer no, and she can’t really argue; she and Myka are here together now, substantially because of this, and they might otherwise have taken… Helena doesn’t want to imagine how long and circuitous a route they might otherwise have taken. They might have eventually followed that route and ended up here. Or they might have been too late.

“It isn’t _just_ this,” Helena says in the dark. They had not, still have not, taken the time or trouble to turn on any lights, and now all edges and boundaries, even those of their bodies, are imprecise, here in this unheavy, gently tenebrated dark. Helena runs her now steadfast fingers up and over Myka’s shoulder, watching them chase their own deeper shadows. “It isn’t.”

“I know.”

“It _is_ this, I did want this, but it isn’t _just_ this.”

“It’s okay. You can’t think I’m in any way offended that you wanted this, can you?” She must feel Helena’s small head-shake, for she resettles her unfree arm, the one that is surrounding Helena’s shoulders, as if in approval. “But… don’t be upset, but I honestly think I’m going to miss the way you’d drop stuff and then get that look on your face.”

“What look on my face?”

“It went through phases.” Myka turns her head and kisses Helena—blindly, apparently, as her lips touch not Helena’s lips or cheek, but her eyelid. “Every single one, completely irresistible. First was clearly ‘oh no this can’t be happening.’ Next, kind of a basic ‘argh!’ ‘Then you’d dart your eyes around like ‘maybe she didn’t notice,’ followed by some internal groan of ‘obviously she noticed,’ and finally, you’d land on ‘oh well.’ And then sometimes it would start all over again.”

“That sounds strangely like the stages of grief. “

“Maybe you really _were_ grieving all that stuff you destroyed. Like your coffee cup, that one time with Pete. Whoops, plus today with Nate, that’s two dead cups.”

“It’s actually three; the first gave its life for science, during the experiment. And to think I had no toothpaste to hand. At any time.”

“Pete told you that story about him and his mom, huh? You might’ve got away with that trick on the one that took his tie out, but that one today? Glass-flavored toothpaste is what you’d end up with.”

“Perhaps we could convince Nate to brush with it.” Helena says this with some bitterness.

“You’re still mad at him? I think today got me over it. From now on, if he bothers me, I’ll just picture his face when he realized he was covered in glass-flavored coffee.”

“I think it was coffee-flavored glass. And yes, I am still angry. Particularly when I think about that night in the bar.”

Myka sighs. “I don’t know what to think about that. It’s true that I might never have left town, but… then you might really have been the rebound that I told Pete I didn’t want you to be. That I hoped you’d be more than.”

“ _That’s_ what ‘maybe not’ meant?”

“What did you think it meant?”

Helena doesn’t answer. Given what has just happened, her fear of what “maybe not” might have meant seems senseless, and yet she did worry over it, did feel it…

“That I might not want you,” Myka says quietly. “Even as a rebound. Am I close?”

“I had to preserve it as a possibility.”

“That’s Pete’s fault. And he’ll hear about it from me, because what I was trying to say—”

“No,” Helena interrupts. “It isn’t his fault at all, not really. I did need to bear in mind that it could be true.”

“It couldn’t have been true.” Myka kisses her, not fervently, but just enough to remind her. “Don’t worry so much about the timing. Don’t.”

They say nothing for a while, and Helena can feel Myka’s breathing evening out, slowing.

She’s surprised when Myka says, very softly, “We should send Nate a thank-you gift.”

Helena is too tired to snort in disbelief. Instead she says, “Anonymously. Perhaps it will drive him insane.”

“The wondering. I like it.” Another long pause ensues. Then Myka says, “You’re a terrible person.”

“As we’ve established,” Helena agrees.

She hears nothing but breathing from Myka; sleep must be inevitable now for them both.

Then, a whisper in the dark: “But I like that too.”

****

The next morning finds Helena and Myka at work reasonably, yet improbably, early. They are in Helena’s office, and Helena is thankful, as she is usually thankful but for different reasons, that their company has not yet decided that employees should all share the same space. Some offices’ doors can, blessedly, be closed. Closed today for the glorious new purpose of allowing two people who have just spent their first night together to gaze at each other in stupefied wonder: that the night happened so recently. And that it happened at all.

Helena eventually says, with heavy regret, “At some point you’ll have to go to your own office.”

“I know. But let me have another”—Myka checks her watch—“two minutes to look at you and not believe my luck, okay?”

“I’ll be disbelieving my own luck all day, regardless of whether I’m looking at you.”

“Suave.”

“I’m not the suave one.”

“No, you’re the—”

“Catch!” Claudia yells from the doorway as the Nerf football flies toward Helena.

Helena catches the football. She catches it, holds it, looks down at it in amazement (because it is true that no one would ever, even under normal circumstances, mistake her for the athletic one), then looks up and grins triumphantly at Myka, who starts laughing.

Claudia gapes at them both. She shouts, “Oh my god! Pants!”

“I thought it was agreed that code words would be very important in our newly formal office environment.” Helena knows she sounds indulgent; she will most likely never again be able to produce an appropriately severe tone of voice.

“I got confused about which one was the code and which was the real thing. Am I fired?”

Helena nods. “Of course you are. Call Pete and tell him to get HR started on the termination paperwork.”

“He hates paperwork,” Myka says.

“I do wonder how he ended up in HR then.” Helena tosses the football to Myka.

Myka catches it one-handed, and Helena mutters “show-off.” Myka laughs at that. “Pete just likes people,” she says with a shrug.

“That’s _weird_ ,” Claudia says. Helena nods in agreement.

“You both like _some_ people,” Myka says.

Helena mock-frowns. “Very few.”

“Just so I’m one of them,” Myka advises. She goes to Helena and kisses her, a light little feather to her cheek. “And Pete.”

“I’d rather he didn’t kiss me, however.”

Myka smiles. “I’ll let him know.” She hands off the football to Claudia on her way out, saying, “I’m pretty sure she likes you too, Claudia. But you’d better not kiss her either, okay?”

“You got it,” Claudia says. “Sorry about the pants.”

“You get a pass for that. The look on her face when she realized that ball was still in her hands? Priceless.” And then Myka is walking away, and Helena—despite a sad lack of library books—feels an extremely strong urge to follow her.

But Claudia is speaking, so Helena sighs and pays attention. “It really was priceless,” Claudia says. “And I really am sorry. But how was I supposed to know?”

“I of course apologize for not informing you immediately, but we were otherwise—”

“Uh, boss,” Claudia interrupts. “That’s not you.”

“What’s not me?” For a moment, she wonders whether something intrinsic about her has changed, something unrelated to her hands. But Claudia is pointing, very specifically, at her ID badge. Helena looks down. “Fascinating.”

“That’s Myka,” Claudia says.

“Clearly. And yet Security let me in the building. Let both of us in the building.”

Claudia chortles. “Security probably understands that people sometimes get a little confused in the morning. Particularly if they haven’t… you know.”

“ _Haven’t?_ I thought we _had_. I thought that was the reason you shrieked ‘pants’ at a volume sufficient to awaken Pete in the middle of a committee meeting.”

“Haven’t got all _accustomed_ , was what I meant. All _used to it_. I bet Security managed to figure it out, and they didn’t even have the incontrovertible football-catching evidence. You two make awfully cute honeymooners.”

Helena ducks her head at the word “honeymooners,” so that Claudia will see neither her slight blush nor her far less slight beam of a smile.

****

Not twenty minutes pass before Pete stops by. He says, “I was in the neighborhood and wanted to say hi. And also hey, because hey, I just got an email from Myka that says I’m not supposed to kiss you.”

“Myka is a woman of her word.”

“Did I say she wasn’t?”

“No.”

“Okay,” Pete says uncertainly. Then he points at Helena’s ID badge. “Hey, that’s not you.”

“I know. Claudia told me.”

“That’s Myka.”

“I know that as well.”

Pete crosses his arms. He squints in the manner of a police interrogator. “If I put that together with the email from Myka, does it add up to what I think it does?”

“I don’t know what you think it adds up to.”

“Yeah you do.”

“If you think that what it adds up to is that Myka is wearing an ID badge that displays not her face but mine, then yes. Yes I do.”

Pete’s mouth takes on a bit of a pout. “I bet she’s strutting about that more than you are.”

“I don’t want to strut about it.”

Now he grins. “Yeah you do.”

Helena can’t help herself: she grins back.

“Toldya,” he says, with a nod of approval. “Now I gotta go find Myka so I can watch her smile like that too.”

****

Of course, because today is the day on which such a thing would happen, Helena runs into Nate. First he looks at her hands, as if to assure himself that he is in no imminent coffee-related danger. Then he looks at her ID badge. “That’s not you,” he says.

“I know.” Helena says. She can’t quite keep out of her voice a tone that she suspects may be boastful.

“That’s Myka.”

Helena tries for brusque. “I know that as well. Speaking of pants, will yesterday’s trousers be saved by a dry-cleaning? You’ll send me the bill of course.”

He looks confused. “Were we talking about pants? But yeah, no. Something about the glass.”

“I’ll buy you a new suit, then.”

“You don’t really have to—”

“Money well spent,” Helena declares. “Money very well spent.”

“Why do you have Myka’s ID badge, anyhow?”

“As I said, money _very_ well spent.” And if, now, she is strutting, just a bit, mostly internally? Well…

****

Late in the afternoon, Helena knocks on Myka’s office door, and when her knock is answered with “come in,” her heart leaps. _Leaps_. It leaps again when, as she enters the office, a smile of seemingly infinite wattage overtakes Myka’s face. Myka stands, says “come here.” The ensuing kiss quickly becomes completely inappropriate, and Helena is visited by a memory of the night before, one so explicit that she very nearly loses her balance.

To keep from suffering a Myka-esque sprawl, she leans back and points at Myka’s—rather, her own—ID badge. “That is not you.”

“I know.”

“It’s me.”

“I know that too. What’s the problem?”

“Security, presumably.”

“But I got to look at you all day like I wanted to. I say we stay swapped until somebody notices.”

“Everyone I _know_ has noticed.”

Myka now pouts, just the tiniest bit. “So what you’re saying is that _you_ don’t want to look at _me_ all day.”

“And we will mark this moment as the one in which I at last came to understand precisely why you and Pete are friends.”

Myka laughs. “We were heading to a meeting together this afternoon, and I turned your badge around to look at it—to look at you—and he said I was strutting, and I said I wasn’t, and he said that you and I are both terrible liars.”

“Also security risks.”

“If you want your badge so bad, go ahead and take it.” She removes its cord from around her neck and proffers the thing to Helena—but when Helena reaches for it, Myka in a flash extends her arm to hold the entire badge-and-lanyard apparatus over her head. Her infinite-wattage smile ratchets up several cardinalities as she waggles the badge back and forth. “I dare you.”

Helena raises a hand up in a halfhearted try, but given that Myka’s heels are even higher than hers are today, she is at least four inches from success. “I refuse to jump for it. I’m not the athletic one.”

Myka keeps smiling. “Well, maybe you can try to persuade me to give it back. How about tomorrow night?” Helena’s nod in response is probably far too enthusiastic, but she doesn’t care if she seems too avid. She cares even less when Myka goes on, “Actually—don’t laugh—I need to go to the library in the afternoon. Want to come with me, then work on that persuasion later?” Myka is still holding the badge up high, still waving it as if she were trying to attract the attention of an auctioneer. She looks ridiculous. Helena wants to ravish her.

The impulse to leap at Myka—to make that jump she would not attempt for the badge—is so strong that Helena feels she must distract herself. She reaches to the badge that is suspended from her own neck and lifts it, looks at Myka’s picture instead, hoping for some dilution, but she gets none. The picture of Myka is actually a very good one, mirabile visu in the context of photo identification. Helena tilts the rectangle of plastic this way, that way… and then she realizes that she is tilting it because she can, and that she can do this because it is not falling from her hand.

Certainly the clothing she stripped from Myka last night, stripped and dropped intentionally, had shown her that everything had changed. She had made breakfast this morning with no trouble—though how she had managed to refrain from burning the house down while observing Myka leaning against the kitchen counter in her rumpled shirt and trousers, looking like a debauched CEO, she will never know. She had even managed to catch the Nerf football. But somehow standing here, standing here in a situation in which she would have been so tritely maladroit just yesterday, is different. A coffee cup from the cafeteria sits on Myka’s desk, and Helena picks it up. She then sets it gently back down. Everything is different, she knows that; last night made it different. Myka is no longer the person who makes Helena drop things, and Helena does not know what comes next. Before, her hands knew. Now no one knows.

Helena looks up at Myka. She must have watched this new coffee-cup experiment, for she is no longer brandishing the badge, and her expression is more serious. Then she reads Helena’s mind: “I really don’t know what to expect from you anymore,” she says. “Now that your hands have got what they wanted.”

“I suppose they have.” Now Helena holds out her hands, regarding them not accusingly, but curiously. “To some extent.”

“There’s another extent?”

Helena can’t tell if Myka is really asking. “I certainly hope so. I’d love to do something grandly romantic, such as sweep everything off your desk, push you down on it, and show you an aspect of that other extent right now. But the custodial staff have lately taken to glaring pointedly at me, and I’d rather not anger them further.”

“Liar,” Myka says. “ _Terrible_ liar.”

That is a bit perplexing. “You think I _do_ want to anger the custodial staff further?”

“No. I think if you somehow managed to push me down on my desk, you’d just grab your badge and run off with it. Probably laughing maniacally. And then I’d have to chase you.”

“Would you really?”

“Of course. Because then you’d have both the badges, and I don’t particularly want Security to escort me from the building for being unbadged.”

“I’d go with you,” Helena promises.

“Weird first date,” Myka says. But she laughs, and Helena knows that this laugh, this laugh and her own continued ability to prompt it, are exactly what she hopes will come next, and next, and next and next and next again.

Helena concedes, “The library tomorrow afternoon does sound like a better idea.”

“Perfect first date,” Myka agrees.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original Tumblr tags: also I was going to knock M down again, and there was going to be a really filthy implied joke, but it got away from me, and honestly things would've spiraled way out of control, and nobody wants that, however I do reserve the right to knock her down at least once more, if it turns out I need to, or even just feel like it, because slapstick otters in love!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for having failed to update in a timely fashion. I have been dinking at this for some time, and it shows in the disjointedness, but maybe there’s a line here and there… overall, though, I feel that it’s massively unsuccessful, and I genuinely apologize for that as well. I set too many things in motion, and while I thought I knew how it would all resolve… anyway, it’s a lesson in hubris, probably, or how you start out having fun and then find yourself in the tall grass saying “Marco” and nobody says “Polo.”

“Take it easy,” Abigail says. “This time it really is just bowling.” She is sitting on Helena’s bed, making fun of her attempts to settle on suitable wardrobe for said bowling.

Helena does not turn around. She speaks to the depths of her quite deep closet. “It is not just bowling.”

“It is. In fact it’s even more ‘just bowling’ than last time, given that we’re all going to be there.”

“But we are not all going to be there,” Helena tells her.

Abigail is obviously not attending to the situation in its fullness, for she demands, “Did I get disinvited while I was hanging out here watching you decide which footwear to trade in for bowling shoes? Or are _you_ not going because you’re still embarrassed about what happened last year?”

“I am not embarrassed,” Helena says. She now turns to evince her complete lack of embarrassment. At that, Abigail makes a face of exaggerated disbelief; Helena attempts to ignore the face as she continues. “I will be there. You will be there. Leena and Sophia, and Pete and Claudia, yes. We are this year’s Team Diversity, and, as promised, Sophia will be its captain.”

Sophia, Leena, Abigail, Claudia: they will all be there because the advisory committees, with their intended emphasis on upper management and collaboration thereamongst, had lasted just ten months, then were sent on their organizational way. The latest corporate reshuffle is entitled “Balance.” Under “Balance,” the company purports to value all employees’ lives outside the office just as highly as it does the time they spend at work. Consequently for this year’s charity bowling event, anyone and everyone who wishes to participate has been encouraged to form their own teams, to invite friends from the community, to bring children if they wish. Sophia, who has for some months been infatuated with the new captain of the US women’s soccer team, and thus with the idea of captaincy, had begged to be allowed to captain Team Diversity, and Helena could not imagine that anyone, with the possible exception of Pete, would find that a problem.

“Aha,” Abigail says, and Helena raises an eyebrow at her. “Yeah, I just realized whose name you left off the roster.”

Helena doesn’t respond, and Abigail waits. Abigail can wait extremely capably, when she wishes to, and eventually Helena gives up. “Her ex is in town,” she says.

“So?”

“So she asked to see Myka. And tonight is the only time she has available. So Myka will be late for bowling, if she makes it at all.”

“So?”

“So I don’t want Myka to see her ex,” Helena admits.

“You can’t think you have anything to worry about.”

Again, Helena doesn’t respond.

“Come on. The two of you have even got _me_ thinking I should find somebody and get all serious.”

“But what if she isn’t,” Helena says.

“Isn’t serious? Again: come on. I know you two haven’t moved in together or anything, but—”

“Exactly. What if she wouldn’t want to?”

“Why would you think she wouldn’t want to? Unless you already asked and she turned you down.”

Helena shakes her head no, because no, there has been no asking. Because: “Would you agree that actions have meaning?” she queries Abigail.

Who answers with a wary, “Yes… but I have a strange feeling that answer’s going to get me in trouble somehow.”

Deep breath. Helena has been keeping this to herself for months, but… “She fell. The first time she came here to my house. Which was… our first time. It was our first time, and she fell.”

“Fell. Fell how? You mean fell in love?”

“Fell _down_. While attempting to walk through the front door.”

“Okay…”

Once again Abigail seems to be attending improperly. Helena sighs, but she’s started now, and she might as well finish. “And the behavior has repeated itself more than once,” she says.

“Okay…”

“Don’t you see my concern?” Helena demands.

“Okay, sure, I get it. You’re worried that your kids will be clumsy nerds on the playground.”

“What?”

“You think she’s actually a fainting goat in a human suit?”

“Please,” Helena says. She thinks, also—absurdly but not completely incongruously— _No,_ I’m _the master of disguise_.

“I’m running out of _ideas_ , butterfingers… oh, wait, here’s another: when she falls down, she scratches your precious wood floors! That’s what’s got you all… whatever you are about this. Whatever this is.”

“You agreed that actions have meaning!”

“And as I very smartly predicted, that answer got me in trouble! You honestly think she’s tripping on her way into your house because she doesn’t really want to be in your house?”

“Possibly. I don’t know. We joke about it, or rather she jokes about being clumsy, and it seems not to bother her, but… but what if that’s true? What if I do ask her to live here and she by some miracle says yes? It might turn out that, subconsciously, she would rather have said no.”

Abigail shrugs. “It might. I can’t make that call. And neither can you, and neither can she. Not until it happens. If it happens.”

“How comforting you are,” Helena says. She pauses, considers. Abigail will be serious or she will not… “Additionally, Myka has a history of doing what she believes she _ought_ to do.”

“Like moving away with her ex.”

It is no great feat of perception on Abigail’s part, but Helena finds it heartening. “Yes,” she says, because Myka and obligations… in Helena’s experience—admittedly, experience of not yet a year’s standing—Myka and obligations have a rather codependent relationship.

“Look, you and I have both heard her say words that suggested she really did know that wasn’t going to work out. Don’t you figure it taught her a lesson about trusting her gut?”

“What if it taught her only a _conscious_ lesson? And her subconscious is now trying to explain something to her via her body, just as mine did me?”

“Or she really is just clumsy.”

“You and Leena maintain that there are no accidents.”

“Some slips aren’t actually Freudian, Leena aside. Some just happen. Are you going to break up with her because of this?”

“Of course not.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to calm down about your scratched-up floors.”

“Stop.”

“Come to terms with the fact that you’re sleeping with a myotonic goat?”

“Obviously you aren’t stopping.”

“Love your little future clumsy nerdlets just the way they are,” Abigail says decisively. “In the meantime, do you know what you actually have to do?”

“I have no idea.”

“Take it easy. Because this time it really is just bowling.”

Helena has no desire to become good, or even competent, at bowling. But she would like, one of these years, to be able to feel at ease while she is performing its required actions in her inevitably poor fashion. “Apparently, for me, there is no such thing as just bowling. And for Myka… perhaps no bowling at all.” She sits beside Abigail on the bed. “I don’t want her to see her ex. It’s small of me, but I don’t want her to.”

“I know,” Abigail says. And for all the teasing, for all the mock insults, for all the supposedly comical insensitivity Abigail loves to show, it is the immediately and completely serious, soothing hue of that “I know” on which their friendship is based.  Helena says often that Leena’s clients are lucky to have her—she doesn’t say, but she knows Abigail knows she believes, that Abigail’s are lucky too.

Abigail’s tone lightens as she goes on, “See now, your girlfriend out with her ex? Even if you don’t actually need to worry about it, that’s a worry that makes much more sense.”

Despite the fact that Helena’s mind is occupied with worries on several tracks, she recognizes this as quite a statement. “Did you just tell me I made sense?”

Abigail groans and drops backward to lie flat on the bed. She covers her face with her hands. “Oh my god I did. I can tell already: this will be one weird night.”

****

At the bowling event—“Bowling in Balance,” it is called, and Helena is certain that she in fact heard the entire corporate campus groan when they received the first e-mail with that subject line—Helena tries not to think about Myka, what she is doing, and whom she is with. She tries. At first that takes no great effort; the bowling alley is a madhouse, full of screamingly excited children and their harried parents confronting beleaguered volunteers who are no doubt ruing their decisions to help administer the fundraiser. (“This doesn’t seem very balanced,” is Leena’s greeting to Helena, and Helena has to agree.) Each person is handed an oversized T-shirt, and permanent markers are available for teams to “decorate” their wardrobe. Sophia consults with Pete, to whom she has taken an immediate shine, and eventually her shirt, as lettered mostly by herself, identifies her as “TEAM DIVERISITE CAPTAN.” She would not really have needed a shirt to declare this, given that she is sporting a white yacht captain’s hat with a shiny black bill. “She insisted,” Leena murmurs to Helena and Abigail.

“I always think she can’t get cuter,” Abigail says. “But then look! There’s a hat.”

Pete’s shirt, after consultation with Sophia, reads “TEAM DIVERSITY DIVERSITY.” Helena squints at him in incomprehension, and he explains, “I’m the only guy. So this one time, I’m the diversity in the situation.”

The just-arrived Claudia tells him, “That’s ridiculous. _I’m_ the diverse one.” This one stumps everyone, but Sophia, taking her captain’s role seriously, is the only team member brave enough to ask why. “I’m the only one who doesn’t have brown hair,” Claudia tells her. “Mine’s red and—”

“Purple!” Sophia shrieks, because indeed, Claudia’s red hair is tipped with purple.

Abigail objects that her hair is _black_ , not brown, and Sophia shrieks in agreement with that as well. Hair fascinates the now-six-year-old girl: she finds Abigail’s and Helena’s frustrating, as little can be done with their smooth, sleek locks, but she loves Myka’s because, she says, “It’s curly like mine but _different_.” She once spent an evening theoretically being babysat by Helena and Myka but in actuality playing with those _different_ curls of Myka’s, winding the strands into tiny braids all over Myka’s head. Later that night—much later that night—the little braids, half undone, made Myka look like some sort of prehistoric tribal warrior. Helena wasn’t sure whether, confronted with that warrior in the bedroom, she was appalled, appreciative, or something else entirely… but eventually any distinctions came to seem immaterial.

Episodes like those make Helena want to discount the threshold situation entirely. In fact nearly every episode that does not involve the threshold makes Helena want to discount the threshold situation entirely.

And even some episodes that do involve it… on one occasion, after a completely unremarkable day, Helena had called Myka, who had had a dinner meeting, just to hear her voice, to wish her sweet dreams, to ensure that her own dreams would be sweeter. She had not even fully expected Myka to answer, but Myka did, saying, “I’m in my car, headed home. Do you want me to come over?”

“We aren’t _teenagers_ ,” Helena had protested. “I only meant the call to say goodnight, not as some… some…”

Myka laughed. “I’m glad we aren’t teenagers, because otherwise I wouldn’t have this car, which as I believe I’ve mentioned I bought new, and you wouldn’t have that house, which _you’ve_ mentioned you bought used. Anyway, the important point is that we did buy these things. Transportation and privacy: very adult. So am I coming over?”

“I could pretend to be apathetic and say, well, if you feel you must.”

“I could pretend to be apathetic right back, but honestly, I changed direction when I saw it was you calling. I’m only five minutes away. I’m going to hang up on you and drive now.”

Helena was in the process of changing out of her sadly utilitarian sleepwear and into something intended to be more alluring when she heard Myka’s knock on the door. Four minutes, not five… but after she called “come in,” she heard a crash and an “ow” and an aggrieved sigh, and Helena told herself quite firmly and logically that the hour was late, her foyer was dark, and anyone might lose her footing under such circumstances. And then she had no time to tell herself anything at all, because Myka, having recovered her footing, had made her way to the bedroom and was whispering in Helena’s ear, “I don’t see how you could possibly maintain your hold on that silk thing you’re trying to put on…”

Work is easier to handle, easier to parse, than is the (for Helena) troubling threshold situation, for over time—that is, after the first few fervid weeks (though Helena is still infatuated with those first few fervid weeks)—they had settled into a sort of normalcy: quite practiced at exchanging heated glances, yet reasonably good at keeping their hands and other body parts to themselves.

Early on one particular Friday evening, Helena was finishing up a final review so as not to be troubled by it over the weekend. Myka lounged in Helena’s guest chair, waiting… because while they did not have any sort of plans as such, they had exchanged more than the usual number of heated glances that week. They were in the midst of yet another such exchange—Helena had read the same paragraph of the proposal seven times, and the only words she was sure it contained were “staff” and “several,” though she continued to hope, and nearly to believe, that the words “eyes” and “green” occurred more than once—when Claudia barreled in. For once, she did not fling the football at either of them, but instead demanded, “What are the plans?”

Helena looked at Claudia, looked at Myka. Myka shrugged. Helena said, “I’m not entirely certain why tonight’s plans, which we do not have as such, are your business.” She congratulated herself on having said neither “eyes” nor “green.”

“Not tonight. Tomorrow! Six months of pants!”

“Only six months?” Myka said mildly. “And yet I feel like I’ve been wearing pants most of my life.”

Claudia rolled her eyes. “Fine. Good graces.”

“Six months already? Astonishing. Are you certain?” One day at a time, Helena had been telling herself. One marvelous, intoxicating day (day and night) at a time, with no hope or expectation of more. But apparently if enough marvelous, intoxicating days and nights were added together, they would stealthily become six months. The number seemed both impressively large and inappropriately small.

“I can count. Obviously you can’t, but I can.”

“But that you _did_.”

“I like to keep track of things. Like days and weeks and months. And plans.”

Claudia did seem to like to keep track of things. The tendency made her very good at her job… so Helena was loath to object when it was applied to her life, despite the fact that she might have preferred not to draw attention to such things as the passage of significant spans of time. That other people might not want to consider significant.

Myka said, “I guess now I feel like we should make some plans, but I don’t have any ideas, other than the library.”

“Fitting,” Helena said. “Although we do go regularly, regardless of occasion.”

“You two are pathetic,” Claudia announced, “but fortunately I’m here to help. Six months? Six _Flags_. Boom. Done.”

“Six Flags,” Helena repeated.

Claudia nodded, with solemnity. “Most of the water rides aren’t open yet, but those don’t really seem up your alley anyhow.”

“And yet Six Flags itself does?”

Again, with solemnity, Claudia pronounced, “Thrill rides. Very anniversaryesque, boss, because a terrified person—in my scenario, that’s you— _grabs onto_ the person next to them.”

Myka laughed. “And in an ideal anniversaryesque scenario she’d do that, but that’s not exactly her approach when she’s terrified.”

“What do you know that I don’t?” Claudia demanded.

“Have you ever seen her see a spider?”

“I have not seen her see a spider. My life is incomplete.”

“I was, true fact, standing next to her, and I saw a spider. Then I saw _her_ see the spider. And then she shrieked in what I’m pretty sure was terror, but she in no way grabbed onto me. Also a true fact.”

“What did she do instead?”

“She grabbed onto a book and battered that poor unsuspecting arachnid within an inch of its life.”

Claudia burst out laughing.

Helena said, “You are _both_ fired.” She wanted to be sour about it, but Myka’s glee in telling the story—which did indeed comprise many true facts—was impossible to resist. Not that Helena found it possible to resist Myka under many circumstances.

“All I’m saying,” Myka called after Claudia, who retreated in search of a tissue for her hilarity-sodden eyes, “is don’t be surprised if on Monday morning you get an email with a photo of a really familiar somebody holding a book, standing over a pile of metal that used to be a roller coaster.”

Helena managed to ignore Myka’s tease of a grin for nearly a minute. Then she sighed and said, “I have the strangest feeling that you now _want_ to go to Six Flags. That if we do not go to Six Flags, you are likely to pout and maintain that we should have gone to Six Flags.”

“Why not? I haven’t been, and it could be fun. Probably not quite as fun as holding your hand under the table during that Diversity Committee meeting this afternoon was, but… so are you busy tomorrow?”

On the following Monday morning, Helena, who had arrived at work early for this express purpose, heard from the general vicinity of Claudia’s workspace a shriek—though one of delight, not terror—followed by an excited, “Can I print it out and frame it?”

“No,” Helena called back, and to Claudia’s disappointed “aw, man,” she responded, “Patience. I have other plans.”

And a week later, Helena watched as Claudia, with transparent delight, unwrapped and then bounced against the surface of her desk a coffee mug featuring a photograph of Helena and Myka, both of them mid-scream, hurtling their way through a twist on an inverted roller coaster.

Tonight, Claudia’s T-shirt reads “TEAM DIVERSITY PURPLE.”

“I wanted to be ‘Team Diversity Tech Support,’” Claudia confides to Helena, “but, well, it was the kid’s call. She’s the captain.”

“How much tech support does a bowling team really need?” Helena wonders.

“Beer kegs don’t tap themselves, boss.”

Sophia comes and stands in front of Claudia, regards her hair, her shirt. “You need to find a purple bowling ball,” she announces.

“I got a new boss, boss,” Claudia tells Helena. She salutes Sophia. Sophia salutes back, very seriously.

Abigail has donned a shirt that reads “TEAM DIVERSITY I refuse to put any effort into this.”

Now Sophia says to Abigail, “I don’t like it.”

“I can bowl or I can think hard about a T-shirt,” Abigail says. “Your choice.”

Sophia decides that her captaincy will most likely be more successful if the members of her team actually bowl. Leena tells her that this is a very good analysis of the situation, and Helena contributes, “To make up for Abigail’s lack of participation, you may write whatever you like on mine.” Pete helps her again, and the result makes everyone smile… though Helena’s smile is a bit wistful: the shirt says “TEAM DEVERISTY WHERE IS MYKA becuse I miss her.”

Helena is under no illusion that the shirt’s statement is intended to express her own feelings, because even aside from the hair situation, Sophia adores Myka. This is primarily, but not exclusively, due to the fact that soon after Sophia’s ear-tube procedure, Myka explained very seriously that Sophia would be a lot happier if she didn’t pull the tubes out because the doctors would _glue_ them back in; Sophia doubted it; Myka revealed in very secret confidence (which Sophia immediately ran and told her mother) that she knew what she was talking about because she had had tubes her ears too. Sophia doubted that as well, so Myka produced a picture of herself at age four. In the photo, Myka looked about as happy with her ear situation as Sophia had since her own tubes were inserted, but Helena herself thought that she might die from this sight of small Myka: as breathtaking as Helena finds her now, she was _that_ adorable as a child. Helena made the mistake of saying as much to Abigail, who scoffed, “You’d’ve had the same reaction if she had two heads.”

And though Helena would have liked to protest that she was not quite _that_ far gone, she knew she had no ground to stand on.

She still has no ground to stand on. Given that and the threshold situation and how everything seems to be about remaining upright and keeping everything in _balance_ —she does not like the way the company somehow managed to reach into the corporate-buzzword ether and extract such an appropriate concept, however unachievable it seems—Helena feels that she should not feel as genuinely good as she does, most of the time. At home, at work… at work, she will every now and then contrive to secretly swap security badges with Myka, because it makes Myka laugh, because then they have to arrange to meet in order to switch them back. In fact, the most difficult part of any given workday is knowing that Myka is right there, somewhere near, all day long, and yet the number of non-badge pretexts Helena can find for interacting with her seem sadly few. She was _almost_ upset when the advisory committee structure was dismantled, for no Diversity Committee meant one less opportunity to see Myka—and surreptitiously hold her hand—on the occasional workday for a _reason_. One that would not be transparently _contrived_.

Pete of course said it out loud: “I’m kinda sorta sad. No more awesome committee-buddies!”

Helena found this statement very sweet. She had expected him to bemoan the reduction in opportunities for naps.

“You two can be awesome community-volunteer buddies,” Myka suggested.

But Pete frowned. “That’s way less a buddy situation. You actually gotta pay attention when you’re _doing_ a thing.”

“Then start being outside-work buddies,” Myka said. “It would help me out a lot not to have to split time between you two in the real world, speaking of balance, which I’m pretty sure we’re going to get really tired of doing.”

“That seems weird, but… feel like giving it a shot, Helena?”

“I’m game if you are.”

So Helena and Myka began to go out regularly with Pete and his Amanda, and that too made Helena want to discount the threshold situation.

Helena asks Pete, “Why isn’t Amanda assisting Team Diversity tonight? She’d provide the much-needed additional hair color.”

Pete says, “Busy.”

“Don’t tell me she’s seeing her ex too.”

“Nah, she had some other charity thing. Sorry about Myka, non-committee-buddy.”

“You should be sorry only if you’re withholding some information from me.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh? Let me remind you of ‘rebound, but maybe not.’”

“That was a _helpful hint_.”

“That was a _confounding mystery_ ,” she corrects him. At this, Pete grins, and Helena rolls her eyes. Then she says, “May I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Am I different?”

“Totally. I mean, probably. But I guess I don’t really know. Different from what?”

“Her.” She supposes it is all right that he did not jump immediately to her meaning. Perhaps that suggests her worries are not as readily apparent as she fears.

“Her? Oh, _her_. Oh, yeah. I mean, hairwise she wouldn’t’ve added any diversity to Team Diversity, but… yeah. She was really high maintenance.” He cocks his head. “I guess you kind of are too.”

“So the difference is?”

“Myka likes maintaining you.” He cocks his head again. “ _Man_ that sounds dirty. I mean she doesn’t have to work so hard figuring out how to maintain you? No, that’s bad too. Uh… she’s prequalified for the maintenance work? No, wait—”

“In any case.”

“She just doesn’t seem so worried about it. It used to be, we’d sit in the caf and she’d be talking through all these things, like what if this happens, what if that… and I’d say, you’re thinking too hard, and she’d say that I think any thinking is thinking too hard.”

“You do think that any thinking is thinking too hard. Additionally, you are once again edging perilously close to _confounding mystery_ territory.”

“What I’m saying is, she isn’t thinking that hard about you,” Pete pronounces, and he seems sure that this is good news.

But Helena wonders whether the latter part of his helpful hint of so many months ago should be reconverted from “but maybe not” to “maybe”… for what if Myka is refraining from thinking hard because for her, the stakes are low? Consciously or subconsciously; it may be a distinction without a difference. Helena has tried not to think too hard herself, has tried to be considerate and give Myka as much space as she needs. Just because they now seem to be a couple, whatever that means anymore, Helena does not want to get ahead of herself… she would prefer to dwell in how pleasant it is not to be following Myka from several paces back. And yet: Helena has caught up, but is she now speeding ahead? Are these too-few months their intersection point, after which Myka will in turn fall behind?

Myka has said to Helena, “I used to think you were stalking me. Not really, but…”, and Helena answered, “ _I_ used to think I was stalking you. Inadvertently. And poorly besides.” Myka occasionally now refers to her, with what seems to be affection, as “my incompetent stalker.” In response to which Helena reflexively thinks, “You should have me arrested,” and she means that in so many ways.

She cannot help but linger upon the idea of thresholds, and what they separate from what. She and Myka might be in a space of time that is literally liminal, it is a limen, a cross-piece under which they are both briefly standing. And then Helena passes through the threshold… and Myka trips over it and falls down.

And tonight, as Helena bowls incompetently, she is trying not to think “or falls backward.”

She is watching Leena bowl—Leena bowls quite capably; her shirt says “TEAM DIVERSITY Best Bowler,” which is a statement of incontrovertible fact—and waiting for her turn when Abigail sits down and elbows her. “Do you know that woman over there? Don’t look!”

“I will not make the obvious joking objection,” Helena says, and she looks. “I know her to say hello to. She’s in HR with Pete, I believe, hired a few months ago.”

“Good. You wouldn’t have noticed, these days, but she’s really attractive. Also importantly, she pings. Be a good wingman and introduce me, would you? You haven’t wingmanned for me in ages.”

“Shouldn’t it be that I haven’t manned your wing? Or, better, _staffed_ your wing.”

“I refuse to ask you to be my wingstaff. That sounds way too corporate. Or like something out of some book that’s got elves.”

“Elves,” Helena repeats absently, but then: “Elves? You did say elves?”

“Lord Wingstaff of the Exalted Elves or something. Doesn’t that sound like something?”

“It sounds like I should take your beer away from you.”

“Don’t you dare.”

Helena shrugs. “Keep your beer if you like, but don’t blame me when your conversational gambits fail to impress.”

“So you’ll introduce me?”

“I would be overjoyed to introduce you. In fact I would be overjoyed to staff your wing position permanently. Because I fervently hope that I myself will never need such a position staffed again.”

“Wait, did you say _never_? How much beer have _you_ had? Are you serious?”

“Correct, some but less than you have, and yes.”

“You seriously meant what you said about wanting her to live with you? The future nerdlets are for real? I thought we were joking around about it. Subconscious whatever, this is a big deal.”

“I did mean it, but considering the subconscious whatever situation, it’s seemed better to relegate certain ideas to my own subconscious. To keep most actions… unpremeditated.”

“You seem to be premeditating your unpremeditation pretty heavily,” Abigail says, and of course Helena knows she is right…  she goes on, “C’mon. Forget about it for a second and help me meet a girl. I’ll even call you Lord Wingstaff if you want.”

“I do not want that.”

The requested introduction is performed. “My dear friend Abigail notwithstanding, my preferred nickname is not ‘Lord Wingstaff,’” Helena feels compelled to maintain, because she might in fact have to _work_ with this woman at some point; the young lady, however, seems to find it amusing, so perhaps she and Abigail will get along well. Helena is shortly thereafter preparing to launch her bowling ball (orange marbled with white, per Sophia’s request that everyone on the team find one of a distinctive color) into the lane—she has not kept track, but she thinks they must be on their fourth game? She gazes at the pins that refuse on principle to fall, or even to wobble, regardless of how carefully she aims or what force she imparts to the ball or what manner in which she launches the thing down the lane…

…and then her fingers slacken, and she hears a resounding crash. Helena regards her now-empty hands with astonishment, then looks down at the polished, glossy wood of the lane. The orange ball rests there, contentedly, next to her hideously clad feet.

So many months have passed since she dropped anything so dramatically and inadvertently that she at first fails to realize what must be happening—and then Myka is behind her, saying into her ear, “You’ve got a 23 in this game after seven frames? Seven frames that bizarrely included a spare? I’d kind of been hoping that last year you were so awful because you were distracted by somebody, but so much for my ego… you’re just bad at this.” _I am also bad at unpremeditating how serious I am about you_ , Helena wants to say but doesn’t. She leans down to pick up her slowly escaping bowling ball as Myka goes on, with a laugh, “How did you even manage a spare?”

“I didn’t. I was briefly playing wingman—rather, wingstaff—for Abigail, so Sophia took my turn for me.”

“Wingstaff?”

“Please do not mention elves,” Helena tells her.

“Ever? Not even at Christmas? Nice shirt, by the way.”

“Sophia’s sentiment,” Helena says. She can’t quite bring herself to own it.

But Myka quirks an eyebrow. “Not yours?”

“Please note that I _am_ wearing it.”

“I note that you’re also wearing a hat. Is the hat her sentiment too?”

Helena nods, because Captain Sophia had decreed that for this game, the person whose turn it was to bowl would wear her hat: hatless approach of the lane was no longer allowed. Leena had said, with a frown of disapproval, “Some captain may be getting a little full of herself,” but once Pete had grabbed the hat and plonked it onto his far-too-large-for-it head, she burst out laughing, pulled Sophia to her, and said, “You were absolutely right. That’s a great new rule.” Now Myka says, “You know, Pete just explained to me very sincerely that he’s Team Diversity’s diversity, and then Claudia made a hair-color-based case for herself, but honestly right now I’m feeling confident that it’s me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m pretty sure I’m the only one whose sexual orientation—very recently discovered!—is ‘you in a captain’s hat.’”

Behind Myka, Pete is tilting his head back and forth. “I dunno,” he says. “I was never into her before, but now that you mention it, her in a hat? That makes her look weirdly cuddly.”

Myka turns around and shakes a finger at him. “Don’t you _ever_ talk about her in a hat again. She is all mine.”

“Hear that, Lord Wingstaff?” Abigail calls to Helena.

“Wait,” Myka says, “ _Lord_ Wingstaff? Where have you been hiding all your servants in that house of yours?”

That house of Helena’s… that house and everything it _does_ , everything it seems to _signify_ , and if that house is the impediment, then—she cannot help herself: she blurts, “If I sell my house, would you live with me?”

Myka has the decency to look confused rather than rejecting the idea outright. “Um… if you sell your house, _where_ would I live with you?”

“I don’t care. Any place at all, so long as your subconscious wants to be there.”

Now Myka raises her hand to touch the bill of the captain’s hat, then Helena’s hair, her jawline, her chin. “You in a hat.” She shakes her head. “This is about the tripping, isn’t it.”

“Certainly not,” Helena says, for one last moment of defensibility.

“I’ll call you butterfingers, like Abigail does, until you admit it, I swear I will.”

And so much for defensibility: “Of course it’s about the tripping.”

“Do you know where I used to trip a lot, when I was a kid?”

“Edify me. Some terrifying venue, no doubt.”

“The library,” Myka says, and she laughs a rueful laugh. “Guess why.”

The library. “I don’t want to. I feel foolish.”

“Well, I’m the one everybody else made to feel foolish back then: how could anybody really be so desperate to get at some books, right? But it was like I was shot out of a cannon. Practically every time I went in, too; the librarians joked about installing a landing pad for me.” Myka kisses Helena’s cheek. “I should have explained ages ago, I get that now. But I was so afraid of seeming too eager.”

“Seeming overly clumsy was better?” So it is Myka’s fault, and her own fault, and if this is truly emblematic of their communication skills, regardless of their mutual fondness for dictionaries and all the words they contain, perhaps they should call the whole thing off anyway…

“You weren’t exactly champing at the bit to explain the dropping things thing while it was happening. Butterfingers.”

“Unfair!” Helena protests. “I made the requested admission regarding the tripping!”

“How about Lord Wingstaff?” Myka asks, with hope.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Captain Wingstaff? If it’d keep you in the hat…”

Helena is flattered and flustered by Myka’s frank admiration. She is also flustered, with no flattery dilution, by what she had not been able to stop herself from saying, and so it is back to communication, and how poor they both seem to be at managing it. She covers with, “I’m sorry, I didn’t even ask how the evening went for you. It had to bring up… things.”

Leena says, “Sophia, bowl for Helena again. I think she needs to talk to Myka.”

“But what if I need to talk to Myka too,” Sophia objects, “because I didn’t get to yet.”

“Let Helena have her turn first. You do the bowling for now.”

Sophia whispers, not at all quietly, “I need the hat! It’s the rules!”

“Tell you what,” Myka suggests, “let’s change the rules a little bit. The new rule is, you let her keep the hat on now, and then you can braid my hair later, okay?”

Sophia agrees instantly. She hurries off to take Helena’s turn at the lane—most likely to attain another spare. Helena likes that this will make her score, and thus her ability to bowl, seem vaguely less pathetic. “You in your braids, myself in this hat,” she says. “Won’t we be a pair.”

“We will. Particularly with T-shirts. Let me show you what I was going to change into tonight, after dinner… as you can see, I chickened out.” She holds up a shirt that reads “MB + HW = ♥.” She says, “It doesn’t have the elegance of good graces equals pants, obviously. And at first I was trying to fit together a bunch of words like empyrean and prothymia… esurience… something about eventually getting to uxoriousness… anyway, it wasn’t working out, and it would have cost an arm and a leg for all that text anyhow. So I went a little more simple.”

Helena says, “Does this mean what I think it means?”

“I’d hand you a dictionary, but I don’t think that would help you this time. This time, you’re on your interpretational own.” She leans over and kisses Helena softly. “Although given how wrong you got the tripping, maybe that’s dangerous.”

“Did you plan this somehow?” And Helena means, did Myka plan for everything to come to a head tonight, for their entire relationship to begin to transform, for that transformation to rhyme so strangely yet closely with that year-ago high five… but Myka answers with a slightly perplexed, “Well, yeah. I had to get the T-shirt printed up ahead of time.”

“I mean the whole thing.”

Helena begins to suspect that Myka is not really perplexed when she now says, “Of course not. The company’s been having charity bowling for what, over fifteen years now? I’m pretty sure it’ll outlive all of us. Plus my ex of the truly awesome timing decided to come to town when she did; I certainly didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“So you planned only the T-shirt,” Helena says, and Myka nods. “Why did you chicken out?”

Myka grimaces. “You said it before, about the evening bringing up _things_. I started feeling pessimistic. Because everything feels so different with you. But let’s face it, I’m still me. And what if it’s me? What if I’m the problem? What if I’ll make a mess of this too, because I’m the problem?”

“You are not the problem,” Helena tells her. “If tonight has shown me anything, it is that _you_ are not the problem, and even _I_ am not the problem. _We_ are the problem.”

“That’s a huge relief.”

“Is it?” It’s rhetorical, this question. Helena knows that her own relief must be completely plain.

But Myka answers anyway. “I had a T-shirt made that says me plus you equals a heart. Even if it’s a problematic heart, I like our chances. Just so we’re both contributing. What do you think?”

“Nate is here tonight,” Helena informs her.

“Not the response I was hoping for, but okay. So?”

“So I’d like you to put your T-shirt on and then kiss me extremely ostentatiously in front of him.”

“I’ll put this T-shirt on and kiss you ostentatiously in front of anybody and everybody. I’ll kiss you as ostentatiously as you want me to, anywhere you want me to. But _wow_ can you hold a grudge.” She’s grinning, however, grinning hugely. Such simple beauty that grin has… such simple, yet hard-earned, beauty.

“It’s true, I can,” Helena says. “But I’d rather hold _you_.”

Myka slips her hand into Helena’s. “I’m pretty sure you’re doing that.”

“In perpetuity?”

“I’m pretty sure you’re doing that too.”

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original Tumblr tags: like I said in the intro, it was so clear how I was going to land it, and then the gear didn't come down or something, never mind the metaphor, that's basically how my metaphors are working out lately, anyway back to the salt mines, actually a lot of historical salt mines are stunningly gorgeous, though the actual salt miners suffered terribly, as is so often the way, I actually just sit at my desk, where conditions are perfectly nice, so I have no basis for complaint, about much of anything


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